Week 74-75 - 'MOS Bespoke Furniture' :Workshop Move In

I am extremely happy to say that ‘MOS Bespoke Furniture’ has now moved in to our bright, shiny new workshop in ‘The Makers Mill’

Only about a year later than originally planned and hoped, but who’s counting right? (By the way if you are counting – please stop! Your input is neither required nor desired) I have to admit that I am rather in love with it, the ‘wood nerd’ inner me is making no attempt to hide its glee the last few weeks.

The space is split into 3 main areas, pictures above and below are of the main workshop where most of the larger machines live and my main bench and assemble area. This area is on the road side of the building with the big front doors for material deliveries.

Pictures above and below are of the lower workshop on the river side of the building, housing further machinery and workspace. As you can see still fairly empty, which I’m still finding quite hard to accept – this is the first time I have had a workshop where not every square meter has something in it or purpose to serve. Here I have space to grow into… in other words, I can buy more tools!

Finally we have the ‘finishing shop’ this space of for…. You guessed it, finishing! In other words applying lacquer/oil/wax etc, also final install of upholstery to furniture and our flock work. Put simply it is a space were you can do all the tasks you don’t want to have sawdust involved in.

(as my hair and clothes are normally around a 20% sawdust composition, I may have to ban myself from this room

I have been auditioning workshop dogs for the new space over the last few weeks. This is Millie, she was somewhat overwhelmed when tied to the biggest pile of ‘fletch sticks’ she had ever seen.

And Zack of course (who many of you know) wasn’t interested in anything except having something thrown for him (which in this case was a rubber glove) Although his reaction when he looked out the window and realised it was in fact the park he was looking at was great.

Week 72-73 - 2nd Fix and Decoration of Bottom Floors

I started this stage of finishing off the main downstairs workshop full of excitement that we were painting – mainly because it meant for the first time we were doing a final finish somewhere in the building. We’re nearly two years into this project now, so a sentence that contains the words ‘final’ and ‘finish’ seem very appealing. However over 100 litres of paint later I remember: I HATE PAINTING!!! 

Lets start with some before and after pictures to make me feel better…

It has turned out very well and proven itself to be the space i always thought it could be, I am very pleased with the space and level of natural light etc. Now I can move all my tools and machinery (toys) in and we can really start calling it a workshop

 (above)View with back towards front by-fold doors, new staircase is now enclosed to give a clean, quite entrance to gallery above

View towards Byford doors, now also has a separate bike storage area

View from spray shop area into lower workshop 

View from river up the workshop towards the main doors

Canopy with integrated lighting over were main work bench will be

View of utility cupboard for main workshop ready for fuse box install

Me looking thrilled to be painting the floor – mardy!

Week 69-71 - Boarding out and Insulation of Bottom Floors

Now all the wiring and pipework is safely cocooned inside our walls and ceilings (on the bottom floor at least) we can stuff them full of insulation and plasterboard.

First we stuffed the internal walls and ceilings with what was once called ‘rock-wool’, although is now apparently ‘ECO-wool’. Don’t be deceived by the soft and fluffy appearance of this stuff. If you were to find yourself stranded naked in the Arctic with just a roll of this stuff to keep you warm – you would have to make the choice between freezing to death or scratching your skin raw.

It is however very good sound insulation to stop any loud workshop noise transferring upstairs to the rest of the building. To improve this further still we have used ‘Resilient bars’ on the ceiling to the underside of the residential area above. These are basically ‘Z’ shaped profiles of folded steel. Rather than the plasterboard attaching directly to the floor joist, one tail of the ‘Z’ profile attached to the timber joist while the plasterboard screws into the opposite tail of the ‘Z’. Allowing the plasterboard ceiling to vibrate independently from the floor joist, reducing sound transference.

We then boarded the ceilings with fire proof plasterboard (hence why it is pink). Because there is residential space over the top of a commercial area we have to achieve a 1 hour fire rating on the ceiling. Now to do this you have to put up 2 layers of ½ hours rated fire board… -what’s that I hear you ask: why don’t they just make a thicker 1 hour board?

It’s a fine question, and one I am yet to of received a satisfactory answer to. So if you are reading this and do in fact know of a good reason, please let me know, because at the moment it’s just double the time/effort/cost for (visually at least) the same result. If not: don’t steal me idea – im going on ‘dragons den’!

The joints in the boards are them taped and filled. This method is not as good as having the full ceiling skimmed in plaster but that would have been a cost I can’t justify for a workshop ceiling.

The walls are then boarded too. I have done this in OSB instead of plasterboard as it is much stronger and will take much more wear and tear in a workshop than plasterboard.

The external walls are filled with 100mm of solid foam (kingspan style) insulation and then counter battened to the outside wall studs and a further 50mm put in. As reference, this is a lot of external insulation, so should keep use very nice and toasty.

I then built the internal wall dividing the customer staircase up to the gallery off from the workshop

Stairs wall boarded out with door and 3 viewing windows reveals ready for later

The bike shed has also been boarded out and separated from the rest of the workshop. I have put a 2.4 meter internal ceiling on it to create some extra storage on top.

We have also pinned thin fire rated strips of timber onto the ceiling to cover up any screw holes and raw edges of plaster before painting

Week 66-68 - 1st Fix Electric and Plumbing

For those not in the ‘know’ [he says being only recently knowing himself – and ‘knowing’ being a fairly relative word]

1^st fix is when you run all the pipe work and cabling through the structure of the building for all your electrical and plumbing needs. 2^nd fix is when you put all the relevant taps/plugs/lights etc. on the end of these cables and pipes. Are we all following?

This means however that you have to make your mind up where a lot of things are going to go in the finished building now, with very little physical land marks to go on. Time will tell if I have laid everything out as well as it could be I suppose, but to be honest I do already plan to lie and say everything was intentional, regardless of the outcome – so bear that in mind!

As we saw in the last post we now have the internal walls creating the residential bathroom and utility closet and the kitchenette and WC of the gallery. The new main soil pipe for the building we put in way back at the beginning of the project already came up to floor level in the right hand corner of the picture above.

The large black pipe connects to the two toilets and then slims down to a 40mm pipe that continues to 3 sinks and the utility closet for washer and drier. The thinner white pipes you see are the water supply pipes to all utilities and also to where the hot water boiler will be. In the same pipe it then runs away from the boiler to sinks for hot water. There is also pipe work running through the floor for the shower tray waste.

The first job with the electrics was to split the mains power where it comes into the building in the front corner and run it to the different areas of the building. We will be having 4 fuse boards in all, one for each floor/area of building. The electric supply we have is a 3 phase 100 amp supply – or in other words BIG! Unfortunately this also requires big cables.

Thank you to my brother Paul who came up to visit me for a weekend to help me run these 2 large reals of cable to the new fuse boards. You may be able to see in the picture above that the cables are not only very thick, they are also armoured with steel wire all around the outside. This makes them less than flexible! To be honest it was a job just getting them off the drums, let alone thought the walls and ceiling. These big cables don’t play well with corners.

Large supply cables running thankfully in straight lines here to the different fuse boards

Cupboard for MOS Workshop fuse box. Each of the larger silver cables run to isolation boxes for the larger machinery

Cables running down to the 2 main light switch points for the ground floor and lower ground floor workshops

While the buildings in an open skeleton like this rather than boarded and plastered etc. it is obviously far easier to run cables around. To this end, during this stage I have also run cables to fully network the building, shown below terminating in the new loft space where we will have a network box.

We have also put in the fire proof cable for the fire alarm and run speaker cable for recessed ceiling speakers.

All in all for this stage of wiring we have run over 1.7 kilometers of cable. This will grow to well over 2km by the time all floors have been fully fitted out.

Week 63-65 - Internal Walls

With all our external walls and doors now on it time to turn the attention to some internal walls and doors (or at least doorways) instead.

I have to admit I was feeling rather apprehensive about this: the first thing we did when we bought the place (which seems a very long time ago now – probably because it is!) was to strip the place out completely, including all the internal walls, ever since the building has been 4 large, uninterrupted spaces. Big enough to ride a bike in, play fetch with the dog or even have a full scale Irish jig rehearsal, so I was a little worried about losing the scale by dividing it up, where are we going to play fetch when its raining outside?

Luckily however it has just turned into rather more, very good size spaces and for the first time you can really see the different areas of the building and how they will interact with each other.

The ground floor walls, as with everything else in the building to keep in line with our flood defence plans are blockwork to the lower half and then timber above. I am still far too proud of myself for now being able to (very slowly) build a blockwork walls – I’m sure I will get over it soon, I promise! But I did have fun pretending to be a bricky again.

Above is the view into and then below is view out of the new clean/finishing workshop of the MOS Furniture main workshop, eventually there will be a pair of swing doors dividing these two areas. The eagle eyed among you may also find a ‘hiding Sophie’ in this picture.

The corner of the upper MOS workshop has also had the bike shed built and divided off. This is to store (as the name implies) bikes/motorbike/camping stuff etc etc. Basically anything you would normally keep in the garden shed.

You can also see the dividing walls around the customer staircase up to the gallery. This wall will have the main internal door into the workshop and viewing windows so you can spy on what I am making.

The lower blockwork wall separating the 2^nd downstairs workshop off is also built; this will also eventually have viewing windows into the workshop to the upper section.

A new stud work electrical cupboard for the main workshop fuse box has also been built in the corner.

Upstairs in the gallery level we have built the studwork the divides the residential flat off from the main showroom space.

To the right of the picture you are looking at the hole for what will be the back door to the top floor flat. On this level there is a small hallway, a utility cupboard for washer and dryer and the main bathroom, the rest of the accommodation is then up the half flight of stairs on the top floor.

The left hand side of the studwork, set back a little is a kitchenette and toilet, doored off the gallery for public and commercial tenants use.

This floor has a 4 meter ceiling height which is just not needed in the bathrooms etc so I have introduced a secondary structural ceiling to this stud area which will give use an equivalent of a loft space. 

Week 59-62 - External and By-fold Doors

Definition of a door: "A hinged, sliding, or revolving barrier at the entrance to a building.”

Unfortunately our old external workshop doors did none of these things well, or in fact, at all. It was therefore time to make some new ones. I am extremely glad to say that these are the last external doors I need to make for the building; however I have left the most complex to last.

These are our old doors that I am reliably informed have served a faithful 20 years and worked well. However by the time we inherited them they were feeling somewhat sorry for themselves. Then they went through a flood, had their bottoms chopped off for the pouring of the new concrete floor and have been boarded up and barely opened (even with the use of a drill and crowbar) ever since.

We have retired them to the great door showroom in the sky and replaced them with a shiny new set of by fold doors

OK, first of all I will address our colour decisions! – I do appreciate that they may not be to everyone’s taste, but I love them, and potentially more importantly, so does Sophie. The colour impact is exactly what I wanted and coupled with the gull wing shaped glazing they fit exactly the design brief I was aiming for. I do spend most of my time designing furniture for other people, unfortunately painting doors in bright multi colours is not something most of them will let you do (wimps!) , so you have to take your opportunities while you can.

Its also important to remember that this is a commercial building that we want people to visit and come inside for a look. So if they grab your attention as you walk past, whether you like them or not, they have done their job well.

At the same time I have also made the single door to the 2^nd downstairs workshop and the main customer entrance door to the building. This means we officially have a working and locking door everywhere we should – no more padlocks and unscrewing temporary boarding to get in and out, yay!

The main customer entrance is in the same colours as the big front doors to my workshop and steals the same glazing design. The 2^nd workshop door next door is deliberately subdued as it is not a door you (as a member of the public at least) as supposed to go through – take the hint! We have also fitted the last window at the same time to the 2^nd workshop.

 Door frames glued up (by which I mean the frames of the doors, not the door frame itself - if you see what I mean!)

The voids in the frames are then filled with high performance insulation and the panel is glued on both sides. These doors account for basically one full wall of the workshop so they need to be as insulated as possible.

We made plenty of colour samples before we actually painted the doors. These is a important task - but that doesn't stop it being annoyingly time consuming and a surprisingly costly task.

Sophie spending what used to be known as a 'day off' getting the first colour coat on the doors

Old doors removed we need to make the new reveal for new doors

New doors lintel going in. This is what the doors header is attached to, so takes the weight. To make things more complicated (as usual) this lintel also needs have channels in it so water waste and supply pipes and electric cables can get from one side of the door to the other.

Finished lintel with soil pipe and water supply pipes running through it

Doors stacked up in the open possition at one side