Well, after years of considering it, and some serious negotiations, and lots us hemming and hawing, we've decided to move the rock mechanics lab (which is now being dubbed "the Rock and Ice Mechanics Lab", I hope it sticks) to the other side of campus into the big warehouse that houses shipping and receiving and was formerly a 20-man machine shop (which I previously wrote about
here).
Specifically, we're moving into a two-room combo that has large double doors connecting the two rooms. So we'll have one room for all the testing rigs ("the rig room") and one room that we'll do all our prep work, prototyping, building in (think anything that gets messy). But these rooms were not quite ready for us to move on in. First, all the previous owner's things needed to be removed.
I'm not exactly sure where they ran off to in such a hurry. There were a few things left behind.
But once that got cleared out, you could see the potential. I picked out paint (when deciding between two bluish-gray-white colors for the walls, one was called "Icy", which of course was the one it was destined to be).
They spray-insulated the ceiling, painted the floors a nice concrete color, and started working on new air supply and electrical around the room. Then all the goodies started to arrive.
In those boxes are new benches, a new freezer. Oh and we got new lights and new windows installed. Plus...
...a new sink!! I'm not sure why this became such an issue, but we had to really negotiate for this bad boy. I guess they didn't want to go through the concrete for the plumbing, so tried to talk us out of one. But when we insisted, they had to fabricate this whole up and over the door pump/drainage scheme.
Then things started to get a little whacky. I decided that I wanted to color coordinate the storage cabinets with the door trim of the rig room. So began a somewhat ridiculous DIY project. If I had a dollar for every time someone told me that I should have sprayed instead of used a brush...but alas, once I got started, I stayed the course.
But now we have benches in, a vibration-free table ready for the cryo rig, a space cleared for our AutoLab 2000 (more about that later), and pretty cabinets that match the trim.
View from the other direction. Double doors lead to the prep room. Just you wait until we get that TV put up!
