Making a Hackspace, part 2

26th Jun 2017

Previously, we were working on our biggest challenge, namely getting a large group of people to agree on the layout of the new space.

We finally managed it.

Original building layout

Diagram of layout M

Layout M

It should give some idea of the scale of the task that the winning layout is “Layout M”, the previous 12 layouts A to O having not passed muster for whatever reason. We were seriously concerned at one point that we’d run out of letters in the alphabet and end up building something like Layout Eye Of Horus.

So, what are we going to do?

The wall between the central cistern room and the former gents toilets will be demolished, opening the “office” space up. The office area will have desks and benches for using laptops and doing “clean” craft activities and electronics (the sorts of things we can do at our current rented space on Monday nights).

A doorway will be created from the cistern room to the former ladies toilets, which will become the workshop.

The janitor’s rooms in both sides will be knocked down, with a half of one wall retained in the office side to separate the tea-making area from the rest of the room. Some sort of device for producing boiling water will be added (maybe a kettle, maybe something better if we can stretch to it), along with tea and coffee, a sink for washing up, and at least one passive-aggressive reminder to wash up after yourself…

The disabled toilets cubicles will be built up to ceiling height to become an accessible toilet on the office side, and a small room for anything especially messy, smelly or unpleasant on the workshop side. Extraction will be fitted to both those rooms, as well as for the laser cutter and possibly some of the dusty machinery. The back wall of the toilet features a gable end, meaning we can vent the air well above head height so as not to annoy (or choke) passing pedestrians.

The main entrance will be on the office side, with a fire escape/secondary door in the workshop.

Other than deciding how we want the building to look, what have we done to get there?

The rip-out of the old toilets has continued, with the ladies janitor’s room being emptied of shelves, sink, broken water heater, sockets and so on. Sinks in both the ladies and gents have been removed, and the remaining toilets have been uprooted and put aside for disposal. After a lot of hammering, drilling, chiseling and levering, one of the trough urinals in the gents has been removed. We would do the other one too, but it’s behind a lot of bricks and other rubbish.

The lighting in the building has been reconnected to the power, and other than a couple of broken bulbs, it works. This has allowed us to get more done in the evening, with Thursday nights becoming “hack the Hackspace” night.

Also reconnected to the power, and the water, is the remaining water heater. After a bit of poking and a lot of descaler, it is now producing buckets of hot water. It’s also in the wrong place, being mounted to a wall which we plan to demolish, so it will need to be moved.

Having power has also meant we could tackle the water tanks in the loft, which needed cutting up into smaller pieces before they could be lowered through the loft hatch and into the big pile of rubbish. A couple of itchy evenings chopping up the fibreglass tanks later, and, bar a few stray bits of pipe, we have now removed the last major pieces of the old plumbing.

Unwanted doors and doorframes have been removed, along with extraneous conduit, wiring and pipework from the cistern room, everything from the ladies disabled toilet cubicle (which will eventually become the dirty/smelly/noxious work cubicle in the workshop), and a heap of junk from the gents.

The only thing which has so far stubbornly resisted any attempt to remove it is the old hand-dryer in the ladies toilet. It’s made of cast iron and is held together by two bolts which we’ve been unable to undo to get at the screws holding it on the wall. At this rate, it’ll probably be there until the wall is knocked down, which is certainly one way of shifting it.

At this point, the toilets have largely been stripped back to an empty building, and it’s time for the building to begin.

What next?

We have accumulated a huge pile of rubbish to get rid of. We’ll probably use our free Hippobag soon to get rid of some of the bricks (the first tonne of them) and the lightweight rubbish. The rest will have go into a skip.

The big thing, once we’ve got plans approved by the council, is to start knocking down walls. The janitor’s room walls are relatively simple; a single skin of brick which doesn’t hold anything up. The cistern room walls are a trickier affair; our current belief is that they only hold up the platform on which the water tanks we removed sat upon (which, at 2 tonnes, is a lot of water), but someone cleverer than us will need to confirm it before we start swinging hammers about carefully removing bricks.

Other things which need doing after that, in no particular order:

  • more rubble disposing of. Knocking down the walls will create a lot of waste brick
  • ceilings made good. They weren’t in the best condition even before someone made a foot-shaped dent near the loft hatch, and there will be gaps where walls are removed
  • walls tidied up and decorated somehow
  • lighting moved or replaced and rewired. Two of the lights sit across where we want to build walls up from the tops of the disabled cubicles, while the lighting in the three janitor/service rooms have their own switches which won’t make sense once walls are removed
  • floor tidied up. Like the ceiling, there will be gaps where the walls are removed, as well as where the urinals are, and the cistern room has manhole covers over a sewer which need sealing.
  • unused drains capping and filling in
  • doors fitting to replace the iron gates which block the doorways
  • the windows need replacing.
  • the roof needs fixing. We’ve managed to source a load of tiles to replace broken or missing ones, but even after that there’s still the small matter of the rotten rafter to replace.

As before, we would welcome any assistance, particularly if you have any relevant building experience (but enthusiasm and a willingness to help is a good substitute). New members are always welcome; get in touch, or pop along to the build night or monthly pub meet