Clean Up Your Creamery (or any building) Design

We may have mentioned this before... We've got a creamery to design! Although a professional may have to step in at some point before we move into construction, we'd like to take it as far as we can ourselves first. It will save money and make us intimately familiar with every nook and cranny of the new creamery as well as the rules regulating its design and function as stated in the PMO (now our bible). It all started a few months ago with a pencil, plastic grid ruler, and some paper. Although they were effective and the tools were enjoyable to work with, the results were decidedly not very professional looking... Maybe if I had a drafters precision, but I don't.
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Going With The (Milk)Flow - Visualizing and Mapping Flow In Our Creamery Design

creamery design, work flow, cheesemakingMilk Flow in green + Work Flow in red = cheese for all at the end!As we get closer and closer to the next milestone of closing on our farm, we’ve been tailoring our to-do timeline (it’s a long one!) and sussing out what to focus our energy on next. One of the biggest projects on the horizon is planning and building our creamery. We dove in at the middle of September armed with books and photos from visits to actual small scale creameries. Since then we have tweaked the design several times as a result of learning of a better practice and additional knowledge of the land it may be built on.

I've learned that one of the most important concepts to keep in mind while planning any structure is flow. The two most important “flows” I’ve been focusing on for our creamery are Milk Flow and Work Flow. Visualizing and mapping flow is an easy (and free) tool anyone can use to aide in their creamery design, or any other building for that matter.
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