We’ve been having a think about how best to keep everyone up to date with what we are doing on the community hub project. Email lists are so unreliable as they are nearly always out of date, and they also take time to maintain. So we have decided to trial a new approach. From now on we aim to blog every week about what we have been working on most recently and what we will be focussing on next. This is to help keep everyone up to date and to give people an idea of what we are up to – even though we might go quiet sometimes it’s not because we aren’t working, it’s just because we are working even harder than usual! We will also use the blog to make any announcements and calls for help or materials.
What we’ve done this week
- Settled into our fantastic new hub work space and held our first team meeting there last Tuesday. We have a bright and airy studio there now where we can meet, work and get stuff done. It’s a game changer for us. And it’s located just up the Ravensbourne river in Deptford! MASSIVE thanks to Creekside Artworks for supporting us http://www.theartworks.london/creekside/. They have created a cool and inspiring place with studios for artists and small businesses, just a stone’s throw from Deptford High St. And they have lots of exciting plans over the coming months, so watch this space.
- Had a really good design review session with Jon Broome to talk through some of the details of our plans. Jon is an architect who has decades of self build experience (including his own beautiful house in Forest Hill) and it’s invaluable to be able to tap into that for our own project.
- Had a site visit with a contractor about starting groundworks and prepping the site for vehicle access. We’re hoping to get that work done in the next month. If anyone knows of any good, reliable and reasonable contractors who could do this work for us, please get in touch on sbhub@theruss.org
- We met some new volunteers in our workspace to get them involved with some of our pre-build tasks. We’re hoping to bring many more in over the coming weeks.
What we’re focussing on next week
- We’re going to be pulling together a detailed programme of works to get a more accurate idea about what needs doing by when, what is dependent on what, and when we can start building
- We need to refine the budget to work out how much money we can spend on which aspects of the project. This is an ongoing task, and as we gather more details about the build we can get a much better idea of how best to spread the money.
- We’re going to be writing a construction pack which will include an overview of RUSS and the community hub project, a more practical build manual for volunteers who will be coming on site to help us, and all of the drawing packs which will explain how the building is built and how it comes together. We need to work on the skeleton structure of the document so we can start to get people to help us write it!
Here’s something we learnt this week
Don’t even think about working without a fan when it’s 32 degrees outside!
And finally, our newest volunteer, Buzz, working hard at the hub workspace today
