Hi Toronto, greetings from Ottawa!
While our shop is not attached to an educational facility, I could answer a few questions.
Floor layouts really depend on two things:
are you dealing with a blank, empty space that you can customize to your needs? If so then excellent! I’m jealous. ;) Some of us are working with older spaces (ours is from 1925) and that often results in things you just have to work around such as weird door placements, uneven floors, etc.
some shops don’t sell used bikes, some do. Some shops offer DIY services, some don’t. Our shop offers both, so we need an area where bikes can be looked at and talked about, and also space for people to work on their bikes. Oh, and if bike donations are what you seek then prepare for needing lots of storage.
Creature comforts: we have some industrial ceiling fans, and a vent fan to pull air through the shop. No A/C. During the current heat wave here it has been around 34C / 92F inside. Thankfully our volunteer staff keep showing up, as well as our customers, but we’re all moving a bit more slowly. ;)
Next year we will be expanding our shop somewhat when our landlord retires and give us his office. We’ll tear down a dividing wall and then be faced with twice as many windows facing the western sun. His space does have an A/C unit but I doubt its strong enough for our entire building, but we’ll definitely install some good strong blinds of some sort. Plus, being Ottawans we seem to like to brag about surviving +30C summers and -30C winters without too much fuss.
I’m actually preparing plans for revising our shop layout, because the expansion will give us a chance to reorient some things and maximize our use of the space (which we’ve been in for eight years).
Some photos are at our website: http://www.re-cycles.ca/
And a whole bunch (incl. from our very early days) on our Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/recyclesottawa/
Cheers and good luck!
Mark Rehder - Coordinator re-Cycles Community Bike Shop http://re-cycles.ca
On Jul 5, 2018, at 4:40 PM, Parag Kapoor parag@regenesis.eco wrote:
Hello all,
We're close to launching a new bicycle co-operative at York University, Toronto, ON, Canada!
I had some requests to ask the community:
I would like to connect with the managers of other University/college campus based bicycle co-ops to discuss practices and business models, go over past decisions made to get to where they are now.
Are there any tool bench designs that are favorites? I really like the tool benches @ Charlie's in Toronto, but would like to see other examples of well thought out tool benches.
Could we look at examples of shop layouts? Has any co-operative made a floor-map with the furnishings placement on it? We have plans as well to share!
Do creature comforts matter? I wanted to be double sure. Normally I would not hesitate myself to say A/C is definitely not needed at first, but for context we are moving from a hidden closet in terms of operations into a 1500+ sq ft. new storefront.
We have big glass windows that face east, which means that by 10 am the place is a broiler. Installing an A/C system feels like the right thing to do....
As well I have a whole bunch of photos of our space and shop logo to share to anyone interested!
Best,
Parag ____________________________________
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