Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, a chant for the ecology movement is also good advice for a small business. So how does it work in a day care setting?
Reduce
So far, the Reduce hasn't been too hard. We don't have a lot of money to spend, so we have to figure out ways to do without. For instance, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has decided that the cribs they previously decreed were safe enough, are now no longer safe. They must ALL be replaced by the end of 2012. There are no retrofits available. Commercial cribs run at least $250 each. We're also required to have an Evacuation crib. The point of this crib is that you place all of the infants in the crib and roll them all to safety at once.
You can see the "off road" wheels and extra structure, that can handle a lot more abuse than the traditional crib. The one in the photo runs over $350. Kits are available to convert a standard crib to off road, they run over $70.
Our first center is licensed for 4 infants, the new one for 8. That's over $3,200 for up to code cribs. There's not much flexibility on the evacuation crib, we'll still have to buy 2 or 3, but it turns out that the infants don't have to sleep in cribs. They can sleep on mini cots like this one.
We already had a bunch of these from another center (see Reuse), that we intended to use for our Waddlers and Toddlers. Turned out they were too much trouble to put out and put away for that group. I guess we get a Reduce and Reuse out of this one.
More below the orange croissant.
It turns out you need a lot of furniture for a day care center. Tables, chairs, bookcases, storage cabinets, changing tables and cubbies. While we did buy some of it new, most of it was used and I built most of the tables. The tables weren't all that hard. I found the adjustable legs and the plastic edge molding online. I already had most of the tools I needed; saw, router, drill, I picked up the MDF and contact cement from the big orange box. My best find was some odd color laminate from the Habitat Resale shop for ~$15 a sheet vs. $45 at full retail.
We've picked up most of our cubbies from centers that are closing, updating or just needed some extra cash. We had enough stored away to open the new center, but we're going to need more soon. A wood cubbie like the one below will cost over $350. There's a solid chance I can build one in a weekend for less than $150. Maybe not the most efficient use of my time, but I enjoy wood working.
Reuse
This is where we really excel. My daughter and our program director are master pickers. They'll spend a Saturday a month tracking down garage sales. They'll also check Craig's List, Goodwill, Value Village, St. Vincent De Paul and the Salvation Army. They even found out that Goodwill has an Outlet Store. I'm not sure how stuff gets to this place, but lots of it is just sold by the pound.
Almost all of our outdoor toys and structures are second hand. I picked up a outdoor play structure with a slide for $50. It would be 2 or 3 times that at retail. I got the fridge in the old center from Seattle Second Use, an architectural salvage place south of downtown Seattle. My wife has an eerie feeling that it's one of the ones that used to be in the break-rooms at WAMU before they closed down and let her go. We spent a whopping $95 on it. Almost all of our appliances are used, some are so old that replacement parts are either not available or nearly as expensive as new equipment. I'm going to be challenged the keep them running for a while.
Not all of these second had finds are real gems. I picked up a washing machine for $35 from a realtor trying to clean out a house. The cabinet was held to the frame by a promise. The realtor kept all of the hoses. It cost me another $20 for new hoses. As I cleaned it up, I found a toothbrush jammed into the top, it was holding the door interlock closed. The plunger on the switch had broken, and a previous owner had just jammed the brush in. I found a replacement at the Sears parts store, $40 please. I got it back to the center, Sears had kept the same part number across models, but the connector had changed, and the new one wouldn't connect to the old one. Now what do I do? A vendor had dropped by my regular job the previous week touting some water tight insulation displacement connector. Back to the blue box for some connectors. Another $5, so far this $35 washer has cost me $65 extra. About a year later we broke down and bought a real washing machine.
Many of the indoor toys are also pre-owned. Kids grow out of Lincoln Logs, Tinker toys and Legos. Parents get tired of picking them up too. They'll get used plenty at a day care. Day care is a rough environment for toys, they're not going to last long unless they're rugged to begin with. So to some extent the used toy market weeds out the delicate toys early. We really couldn't afford to buy enough toys in enough varieties for 45 kids at full retail.
An important part of the day at daycare is Nap time. It's a toss up about who needs the nap more, the teachers or the kids. Originally we had 20 of the cots like the one above, picked them up from a day care that decided that they were too much trouble. I had to wash them down and build a storage rack for them but they were quite serviceable. The teachers got tired of having to (wo)man handle the stack apart every day so after about a year they were retired. Now they may have a second life in the infant room. The waddlers and toddlers have little fold up mats, maybe 2 feet wide and 3 feet long. We got most of them from other centers that were upgrading or moving on. Only bought a few new. The preschoolers are generally too big for the little mats, so we needed a different answer. Somewhere along the way we had gotten hundreds (at least 2 stacks 7 ft high) of 2 foot square interlocking floor mats. A school was replacing them because they had used them for a few years and were getting new ones. We found that you could interlock 2 together, tape the joint with good old duct tape and place them in an extra large pillowcase had have a ready to go nap mat. Grab your favorite blankie and stuffed toy and it's time to sleep.
Recycle
Not your standard separate the glass, plastic and paper. Take something and re-configure it for a new life. You might call it reuse, but this really is recycle. The local Half Price Books redecorated their space last year. My wife picked up 3 of those large displays that they kept the old vinyl LPs in. All 3 for $30, there was more than $30 of wood there. At first we tried to use them as is for class room storage. But, they were too big and not very efficient. I cut one down and turned it into 2 bookcases, each 32" tall by 54" long. I got smarter and tore the next one down and got 2 more bookcases out of it but now I've got extra wood and might get a most of a 3rd bookcase out of it. The last one is in the infant room for car seat storage.
I picked up a round cafe table in a Goodwill for around $10. I took it apart, cut about 12" out of the pedestal, put it all back together and now we have an art table that the preschoolers can all sit around and paint or color. My daughter has been buying up old entertainment centers and wants me to remake them into kitchens something like this:
The plastic ones at Toy R Us go well over $200, this is a $10 Goodwill find, some knobs, a pan, a recycled faucet and a bunch of paint and some very rich imaginations.
She also wants me to try rebuilding small dressers into doll houses. And some of the extra entertainment centers could be dress up stations. Hanger bar or hooks, a mirror , some outfits and you too can look like a princess or a fire fighter. They're big on "sensory" tables. A contained space where the kids can play with sand and water and not get the rest of the building messy. She thinks I can make one out of an old coffee table. It's kid height, I just need to cut a couple of holes into it for tubs, and they can play to their heart's content. She picked up a couple of end tables with glass inserts, she thinks I can replace the glass with plastic, build a box under the opening, add a light source and make light tables for tracing or coloring pictures.
Cabinet doll house:
Well they've got my work cut out for me. If I ever get any of it done, I'll be posting about the process.
The Center is now open. We've only got 2 new students so far. We picked up a few families at our other center that had previously attended the closed center. They'd like to transfer their kids up here since it's closer to home.
EDIT: Wow Spotlight!, Thanks folks!
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Previous Adventures:
Intro
The New Center
Floors in the New Center