Aspen Way Development

After all his hard work Kieran takes a well deserved break in the now complete (minus the 42″ plasma screen) rest area.

Finally the office space is just about finished. This should give a good idea of what each of the 3 bays look like.

The trim has been placed on all the frames and spare parts have been fetched from the suppliers. It seems quite slow progress but with each day the offices are taking shape. Each desk will have its own whiteboard, pinboard, lockable filing box, and drawer unit. All should become clear tomorrow.

Desk building started today in earnest. With 12 desks to complete in 3 days it seems like plenty of time but the disadvantage of such large functional desk units is that they are heavy and complicated to put up - especially with no instructions! Herman Miller may be an award winning design but I’m beginning to think the awards aren’t handed out by the people that build their furniture. Needless to say I’m sure it will all be worth it and everyone will appreciate the extra space they’ll now have.

After the first day though a good amount of progress has been made getting all the frames up for the desks which gives a good idea for the space in the office.

The carpets are down in the main open plan office. They are a slate grey colour and have turned the space from timber floored hall to a nice office space.

With the nice new server case hanging off the plasterboard Patrick has now installed the patch panels and the fan units ready for the computer systems to be brought across!

This handy little device that we installed today is helping to measure our power consumption and cleverly calculating our yearly bill given what is turned on at that exact moment.
Three sensors are attached to each of the phases coming into the building, which are in turn attached to a radio transmitter. The transmitter then send a signal to our friend the Wattson which stores up to 4 weeks of power usage information. This can be downloaded via usb to give an accurate reading for our power consumption over a set period and how it is effected by different activities - from installation of the office to what it is when the office is running.

It needs to be recalibrated at the moment to give an accurate cost per unit of electricity as it is currenlty set at 13p/kWh!

With Steve measuring to the micrometre the door separation on the units the kitchen has now taken shape minus a plinth and the carpet fitters to come in later on today and complete the tiling upstairs and downstairs.

Thanks to a break in the weather we have finally had a chance to get the much needed roof repairs. It will mean that the building will be 99% leak free and Neil and I won’t need wellies to go into our office! Rumour has it that 2000 replacement SEALED bolts have been fitted to the roof and the central join has now been sealed with an insert to prevent the wind blowing the rain down through the central seam and in between the two skins.

It was quite a day to be up on the roof in the sun and current thinking is we could put some decking up there for summer afternoons - with WIFI access we could have a new open plan office.

Yes there are still a few more tiles to go up!! Obviously the awkward jobs were left to last and Russell and James threw up the scaffold above the stairs to get the last bits of tiling and insulation up.

The new Chippendale Kitchen is being installed by the new furniture perfectionist Steve. The kitchen units will measure nearly 3m in length which is quite a marked improvement on 75cm!! There will be space for a microwave and automatic hot drinks machine (WITHOUT plastic cup dispenser).

The toilets are being finished off and painted before the safety flooring goes down next week. The reception has now been painted whilst the furniture is ready to be moved into the new offices, Everyone has been mucking in!

Ok so I have finally got round to getting a picture of a completed desk unit online. These are quite adaptable systems and can be configured in a fair few different ways. The white board can be moved and different trays can be mounted where the blue panels are. The smaller blue panel diagonally to the bottom left of the whiteboard is raisable to give access to the power, network and phone points that have been put in behind the desk.

Two of the nice Gordon Russell sofas that are going into the reception area have been moved in, sorry for those that were promised to see them in the rest area but I really don’t think there will be room! Here’s a quick preview.

With the insulation and ceiling complete the louvres have now been installed throughout the building and the furniture is starting to populate the offices before the carpets in the open plan office are laid. As you can see the beams that would have been below the ceiling had been moved upwards and replaced by some 200mm diameter beams above the ceiling supported by the diagonal members seen in black on the photo below.

Once all the insulation had been installed and the carpets were cleaned in the offices and the boardroom we started the mamoth task of bringing the 4m long boardroom table across from Stephens garage. Designed and built by the renowned furniture company Gordon Russell the table can fit up to 12 people around it meaning the room can double as a classroom, boardroom or fairly intimidating interview venue. Its quite an interesting axe head shape meaning we can seat one person at the head of the table, four on each side and three at the end. Neil assures me it is beech wood but I will need to contact hands.co.uk who have recently aquired Gordon Russell to find out exactly what the table is made of.

The rear offices and boardroom have now been carpeted. With the reception flooring, open plan office carpeting and safety flooring scheduled to be laid on the 20th of January the office is now taking shape. I have a photo of one of the Herman Miller work stations that I promise to put on soon to give you an idea of where you’ll be working.

With the HVAC system fullly installed the ceiling tiles and insulation has now gone up. We have installed a double layer of Rock Wool 100mm. Giving 200mm of insulation and a U value for the ceiling insulation of 0.14. We are within the building regulations requirement for a renovated building at 0.16. The U Value is basically the inverse of thermal resistance (1/R),measured in W/m²°C, it is the watts of energy transmitted by a square metre given a one degree difference in temperature between its two sides.