447 Hackney Road/Toilets

The Plan

• Paint.
  • Estimated amount of time to do? Around a day per toilet or is that optimistic?
  • We want a strip of magnetic blackboard paint around the walls, broken by a neutral colour (TBC) at the top and bottom. This needs to be lighter than the current blackhole scheme.
    • Do we really ? If people have witty or erudite comments to make, must they be written on the toilet walls ?
      • I am actually shocked at the lack of witty or erudite comments or penises on the walls of the toilets after over a YEAR of our occupation of the building... Akki14 (talk) 21:36, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
  • Are the walls paintable as is or do we need to prepare them?
    • Paintable as-is. There is flecked paint on the walls but we can't do much with that. Russ (talk) 17:10, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

• Floor.
  • Estimated amount of time by someone competent : googling suggests 4-5 days for average sized bathroom, possibly longer for our bigger/longer toilet rooms?
  • Estimated amount of time by us amateurs without proper tools: Forever +1 day? What's the worse case scenario? Can we semi-train a small fleet of monkeys to work on it? Taking one toilet out of service for an extended amount of time isn't impossible if we need to pace ourselves.
  • The current vinyl is manky and coming up. We want to tile it.
  • What do we need to do close up around the base of the toilets? ATM they're weird manky wood iirc :S Akki14 (talk) 21:36, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
  • Do we need to use levelling compound before we do this? Who has experience of tiling? What tools do we need?
    • We won't be able to tell for sure until we rip the vinyl up, but it seems unlikely it'll need levelling compound. Tools needed: a trowel, a bucket, and some way of cutting tiles (If we can get hold of an electric diamond tile cutter, this step will be a lot easier). Russ (talk) 17:10, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
  • Budget? Cheapest tiles are around £20/m^2 ... but mosiac tiling would be easier to lay, easier to make fit spaces (utility knife to the backing vs cutting with electric tile cutter) but looks like minimum cost is around £50-£50/m^2 so it's quite a lot more.

• Plumbing.
  • Does any of the plumbing need work while we're ripping stuff apart? Now is the time.

• Electrics.
  • The lights in the toilets are awful. We need low energy, bright bulbs in good fittings. The ceilings are very high.
    • Low energy bulbs are still pretty poor unless you have a lot of them. White walls are very helpful in reducing gloom (though some decoration does help reduce the sterility of all-white)
      • Standard bayonet fit self ballasted fast starting CFLs are easily available up to 30W. Should be more than enough for the space.
  • The two sections of the toilet are switched seperately. Do we want to keep one/both switch(es) or install PIRs like the kitchen?

• Cool Things.
  • PIR sensors for space activity heatmap.
  • Toiletcam
  • Small hanging basket with plants near the windows.
  • miko (full size infinity mirrors! Mirror glass/reflecting metal on left and right walls)
  • Small, custom lasercut mirrored acrylic (A3/biggest our lasercutter does). Less steal-able/breakable. More cool.

• Hot things
  • a hand dryer in the toilet that's missing one.
    • N.B. Paddy hates them so some other method of hand drying would be nice. => paper towel dispenser + bin? Cloth towels are likely to get filthy and not get washed often enough.
    • Can anyone get Dyson to give us a couple of air blades?

Disabled accessible toilet?

The toilet with the shower has grab handles, but iirc the doors are too narrow to be wheelchair accessible. With the interior walls knocked down and the sink removed it could be made wheelchair accessible.

Shower

I'd like to propose keeping the shower, and fixing it so that it works. Not for general use, but as a nice thing to have in case of a catastrophic accident with paint/whatever. I'm not sure what needs doing, if this is a good plan or if it will be too tempting for people wanting to use the space as a base of operations. Opinions.

Link Dump

• http://www.homebase.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?langId=110&storeId=10151&partNumber=125029
• http://www.tilehq.co.uk/carrara-black-wall-tile.html