I thought I would share Colins post about why his business ended up in Luseland and NOT Kerrobert. Colin Leinenweber Thanks for all the congratulatory comments everyone. They mean alot to me. Lastnight, in a conversation with some friends including Brandy Beausoleil-Osterhold and Gerri Parnitsky Walz, it became quite apparent early on that there was plenty of confusion regarding my decision to expand my business Luseland. With that in mind, I thought it best to at least offer a rudimentary explanation of what happened over the past couple years of arrested development of my expansion here in Kerrobert. Initially, I had approached the town about purchasing the old hospital lot beside my house shortly after it was demolished. I later learned that I was one among many who were rebuffed on the reasonable grounds that the town did not technically own the lot. That was fair in my opinion and I dropped the subject immediately. A couple years later, I purchased a lot on Atlantic and Bosworth with the intention of setting up a pre-engineered steel building for engaging in the butchery of wood. In a funny twist of events, the commercial inspector charged with approving the permit plans suggested that the entire foundation be engineered. His grounds for recommending this were based on his different interpretation of what particular class the building fell into (as per the NBC). I complied with his request and had an civil engineer make some technical recommendations based on geotechnical data and was faced with a near tripling of foundation costs. Of course, my initial budgets set out for that portion of the construction were nowhere near sufficient, so I basically dropped that idea and liquidated the building package. While all this was happening, and I was scrambling to figure out a new plan, I was approached by our Mayor to develop a proposal for the lot beside my house. Upon hearing this, I became quite excited since I was still under the impression that the lot was not available, but given the source of the suggestion, I assumed that this must have changed! So, in collaboration with Keri Martin in Luseland, we worked on a radically different concept for a workshop that could be feasibly situated in a mixed use zone. The two main challenges we faced were sound transmission and toxic exhaust from conventional finishing techniques. During the battery of meetings with the town council, I presented them with a building that looked more like a large house. The way it was situated made use of its southeastern exposure for solar gain with a system of clerestory windows. It was to be super-insulated with double stud wall assemblies filled with dense pack cellulose as a way to cut noise transmission which I figured would basically only affect my house anyways. As for the question of toxic exhaust, it was decided that that the extent of finishing that I could do would be limited to using water borne solvents and pre-finished goods. To use anything solvent based would require me to do it elsewhere. I tried to avoid it like the plague anyways, because using it is indeed harmful to the applicator (various degrees). In short, the building proposal was rejected by the council for reasons undisclosed to me, but I would assume that the aversion was based on some warranted concern over having this workshop located in a predominantly residential area (for the reasons outlined above). That was understandable to me, especially in the case of a conventional industrial structure sticking out like a sore thumb in a sea of bungalows. Of course, that was what the designer and i precisely tried to mitigate and avoid, but I dont know how much the broader community knew of the actual lengths we went to in this vein (outside of the council). Regardless, following the rejection of this proposal, and given my waning trust in the town government, I decided to look elsewhere for a suitable situation to establish a new kind of building that would look quite different than what conventional North American woodshops. After looking around at a couple of surrounding towns, I found an ideal plot in Luseland, and havent looked back since. Luseland, in my short but intense experience, strikes me as a very progressive town with an enviable mixed economy that enables it to keep its infrastructure in a superior state of maintenance. This should be quite attractive to many fledgling businesses looking to set up shop since the funding needed to keep such a beautiful town looking like it does is defrayed by a few collectively owned concerns that seem to be successful. Very smart.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 16:38:26 +0000
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