Even though we aren’t open yet, we’d like to share a couple shots of the space in progress. New Friend of the Space, Rodney, took a few excellent shots of the progress being made a few days ago. Thanks for helping out and thanks for the great shots, Rodney! We’ll have some more shots of things cleaned up a bit more shortly.

As much as we like photos, we are really anxious to open up our doors to Milwaukee again. Hopefully we’ll see you around the new space soon!

We haven’t found a home for all this stuff from Chase yet.

This is where our car area and the machine shop will be.

This is where the bulk of the machine shop will be.

Milwaukee Makerspace’s new building at 2555 Lenox St. used to be the home of a data center and had two computer rooms, each with a raised floor. On Saturday, 10/27/12 several members got together and removed the last of the tiles and posts.

Roughly 1,000 tiles, each weighing 18 lbs., were removed from the west room and stacked in a dumpster for recycling. The west room took about 90 minutes to complete with 7-10 people! Thanks to everyone who turned out and we’ll be posting more news as the building comes together!

When Milwaukee Makerspace started in August of 2009, Tom and Royce gathered a group of people who had a common interest in starting a hackerspace/makerspace in Milwaukee. A group met at Tom’s house for the first meeting, and then moved to the local Culver’s, meeting each week to discuss current projects, and plans for a space. By November 2010 the group acquired a space in the Chase Commerce Center, and with 13 founding members they launched at our current location, and then added two more members before a soft opening party in January 2011.

We’ve gone from 15 members at the start of 2011 to over 70 members near the end of 2012. We’ve seen our capabilities expand, the list of equipment grow, the number of projects explode, and we’ve also gotten involved in the community. It’s been pretty amazing the last 20 months… and we’re ready for the next step.

We’re about to start the process of moving from our present 6,000 square foot space to a new 16,000 square foot building. Don’t worry, we’ll still be in Milwaukee (and still in Bay View) and in fact, we’ll be moving more into the heart of Bay View, into an entire building at 2555 South Lenox Street on the corner of Lenox and Otjen, one block off Kinnickinnic, next to the McDonald’s. If you’ve been to the Bay View Library, The Hi-Fi Cafe, or Rushmor Records, then you know the area.

So what does this all mean? It means that instead of exclusively working on our own projects for the next month, many of us will also be working on building out the new space: having a Sawzall party on the roof, knocking down a wall or two, building up several new ones, etc!

We hope to offer a lot of new capabilities at the new space, things we’ve wanted to do but may not have been able to due to limitations of our first space. We’ll also be looking at hosting classes and other events at the new space.

If you’ve been interested in joining Milwaukee Makerspace, you’ve got two options… join now, and help with the move (and have a hand in what the new space will be) or wait until we’re all moved in. That second options sounds sort of boring though, and I’m sure you’re more interested in helping us create an amazing new space here in Milwaukee, because you’re a bold maker with great ideas.