Changing Gears PT.4 - Accelerated Evolution

Often when you think about Evolution you think about a microbe in a basin of water transforming from a single cell and transforming into a fully fledged human... In our case we're on a different tangent, the evolution of the workspace. Anyone who has built a house, renovated, or fit out a shop will know that the biggest challenges are often the evolving requirements and how that plays out in the design phase. As you saw in Part 3 we thought we had meshed out a lot of our idea and created the perfect plan but these things often get thrown curve-balls because, well... That's how building tends to go.

So I (Matt) am a complete control freak when it comes to certain things in life and I was probably pushing David a bit with my concept and idea. I was looking for new ways to speed the process up, looking to get things done faster and it wasn't exactly what we probably needed.

One of the criteria we had was that our workshop was needing some very specifics sets of things to be done a certain way to make sure it's a usable space. For the mechanics who are reading this, you will understand the next section.

When you're working on a bike you need to be able to access specific sets of tools regularly and the idea is that your tools should be easy to access without the bike or anything else interfering with your work-flow. Unfortunately for us we have this little dilemma called "tiny shop" where nothing is easily accessible. Once again I was pushing for a miracle as the initial design provided by Woodsters was the most aesthetically pleasing option however not as practical for us in a working environment. It was with this that we began our design of our "all in one work-bench, kitchen sink and bike stand holder... thing. After chatting with Matt's Step-Father, who is a builder, he knocked a design based up on our specifications and using recycled timbers he had from renovations on their house he built a sturdy workbench for us.

Woodsters had already built in the ceiling for the workshop and begun the beam work for the shelf which gave us a bit of an idea on where everything would end up falling in place, however it wasn't long before the building slowed again as projects shifted for the team at Woodsters. I don't think they were expecting us to be so organised and driven to get this finished. I would assume most clients aren't as hands on as us.

By this point in time we had started to realise that the construction process was going to take a lot longer than originally quoted due to the joys of being the first time we had undergone the process of a shop re-fit. It was here we began trying to speed things up where we could. Our first target was to paint as much of the workshop area as we could, beams, supports, the lot! Next we thought it would be go to get the workshop bench and roll-cab in so we could begin repairing and servicing existing customers bikes in order to keep things rolling. The team at Woodsters would have probably preferred we didn't begin set-up, but we were in a sticky little situation where customers wanted our services and we wanted to service our customers... Thankfully they worked with us on this and it wouldn't have been easy for either of us.

I guess this is the challenge of trying to accelerate Evolution?