My Quest to Own a Hackerspace

[Flack]

Let me start off by saying "quest" is too strong of a word.

In the mid-90s I remember hearing about the L0pht, a rented loft in the Boston area. It was one of the first real hackerspaces -- that is, a common space rented by hackers. It sounded like a clubhouse for guys who liked to hang out, build stuff, have fun and occasionally cause trouble. It sounded like fun to me.

I have often dreamt of owning a place like that. A hackerspace, for me and my friends. It would have to be a building that I could rent and/or buy and possibly split the payments with other like-minded people.

It almost happened a few years ago. I found a place near work for rent that was $600/month. I could have split that with a couple of people but if worst came to worst, I could cover it myself for a while if I had to. The place wasn't as big as I had hoped and came with bars already installed on the windows (a bit of a red flag). Unfortunately it was right around the time I moved to the north side. Suddenly this place that was 10 minutes away from my house became 25 minutes away. I waited too long for it and soon someone else had rented it so that was that.

I have to tell you that I would be satisfied with one of those big ass buildings in my backyard. Unfortunately, neither of my last two places had the real estate needed for what I want. Maybe the next place will. It would certainly be convenient to have a big building in my backyard though. No rent, no worries about sharing the space with people or running security, and lots of room for crap!

Today another place popped on to our radar -- an old church. Another idea I have always been infatuated with is living in a non-standard building -- an old gas station, a church, or some other re-appropriated building. I also read that this church came with a 2500 square foot building. We had to go look.

Our first stop was the church. I haven't been inside a lot of older buildings with raised wood floors, but with every step I felt like I might go through the floor. It felt more like walking on a trampoline than a real floor. The whole building smelled of mold and piss. Mentally I was thinking about using the chapel room for something but the entire floor was built on a slope (think stadium theater seating) so unless you wanted an arcade on a 15 degree slope, it wouldn't work. Upstairs were two small rooms, both 8x8 I'm guessing. I had to duck to do up the stairs to avoid banging my head.

Next up was the storage building. It's a big ass concrete cube, painted white, with a concrete floor. It wasn't 2,500 square foot -- it was a two-story, 1,250 square foot building. The ENTIRE bottom floor was full of junk. We learned that the owned has been using it to hoard stuff for the past 10 years. We didn't ask if it came as is or if he would clean it out. Upstairs were small Sunday school classrooms. There were holes in every piece of sheetrock from teenage vandals. Awesome. Upstairs looked like every abandoned house from every horror movie you've ever seen.

Asking price was $165,000 and I'm guessing a low estimate would be another $100,000 to fix it up. Had to pass on this one.

The dream is not over for the hackspace, but the space was not the one for me.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I think that's the ideal. A place for guys and gals like us to go and be surrounded by the kind of retro shit and new tech like Makerbots that we all love.

I'd be incredibly productive in an environment where two of my pals were playing Lode Runner on an Atari 800 across the room, one dude is on a stand-up Defender, some person is making throwing stars with the 3D printer, Paul at the kitchen cooking crepes.

I think the closest thing to that I've ever seen has been the local haunted house. On Wednesday there were six or seven men and women doing their thing to get it ready.