Office Refit – Wanaka Wastebusters
Jan0
Mooted quite a few months ago I finally managed to find an accomplice, the extraordinary Gutter Man – Tony McCutheon aka Gromme, and get the office refit project for Wastebusters well underway last week.
The goal was to increase the productivity of the office space by providing storage for each work space and some division between them. I adopted a rule of 1m3 storage per 1m of desk space, which is a lot but reflects the fact that the office space is connected to the best second hand shop in ~ Wanaka? The world?
Storage is provided by the vertical cases which also split up the desk space. The traffic way around the central island is also now blocked to provide a private (Simon!) workspace. Walkways only work if there is enough room to transit without interrupting which there wasn’t in this case.
All construction is from seconds 15mm plwood from Trademe, some of which was… er… very second rate. To be expected I guess. It all screwed with superscrews so it can be re-configured or dismantled easily at a later date.
Below is the quick Sketchup representation I did to convince everybody it would work, and below that some pictures of it in progress.
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- New printer station with paper and toner storage above
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- Before - all deskspace is linked and storage is mostly under desks.
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- During refot - Storage towers are in place and extra shelving.
GetReal Kiwis – www.getreal.org.nz
Mar0
Part of my work last week was creating a project scope around the idea of moving the excellent lobbying work being done from the Wanaka Wastebusters HQ into a national conversation with interested people.
What we are looking for is a mandate to be a bigger actor in the decision making process around the creation of waste and recycling. The work that is already being done would be all that more powerful if we had a documented constituency behind us.
There are many precedents for bringing ideologically close people together through the Internet to support campaigns, the likes of Get Up Australia and more politically partisan the recent Move On campaign in the USA.
I put a lot of thought into the possible manifestations and decided that to maintain any momentum the presence has to be more a conduit than a single issue site, a rolling maul of campaigns around issues which we can offer high level research and action. It could also act as a vehicle for other activists who share our leanings and are looking to connect with a broader voice.
Of course we have to be careful (thanks Phil) of asking questions with out a context and only ones we can actually deliver results on with the right support. What is exciting about Wastebusters is we have the resources and the skills to do this, we are not starting from scratch.
Once the idea crystallized I started mapping it out in a database data structure – I find this can, strangely, be a good logical test of what is a social idea. A bit of tuning, a re-presentation, a fortuitously available CakePHP collaborator and we should be live in a couple of weeks.
Insulation – Round 2
Mar0
My house is the first house I designed and therefore comes under the ‘allowable mistakes’ section I guess. I mistake is only a problem if is not assimilated into future practice, and of course remedied.
One of the biggest was not sealing the strawbale wall top adequately, combined with the curved and therefore gappy nature of the surfeit it resulted in way too mch air movement through the rafter cavity. The roof is insulated on the exterior of the waterproof membrane so the dew point can not be inside but with the rafter cavity running some brisk natural air-con the insulation never really got to do its job.
So, the problem sat in my draft addled head for many years. How best to inject insulation with the least amount of work and maximum impact.
I found Paul Kennets house insulation project very inspiring but I didn’t really want polystyrene inside the house where it could rain down through the micro gaps in the T&G ceiling. But the method made sense.
My belief is that an unwanted singular thing can be a problem, waste I guess – but a lot of an unwanted thing is normally a resource I started looking for insulation options from the wastestream. It didn’t take long to find bedding grade polyester fibre insulation offcuts through the Christchurch waste exchange Terranova. Toby and I needed a shipping container so as it was travelling empty I took a day to fill it with free insulation in Christchurch and ship it down.
So the last few months has been the occasional session of ripping up 30m3 of insulation and blowing it into the roof space with a Ryobi leaf blower on suck (over 200kmh muzzle velocity!). Kinda noisy and mindless work but it already seems warmer.
Clients
