As you probably know by now, we have purchased a site for our new office. Since closing at the end of the year, little has happened. I have spent a few hours each day at the site-changing locks, putting plastic on windows and cleaning up some of the garbage. We are looking at appraisers now, and meeting with all manner of people.
Yesterday was a lovely day, and I was excited to clean up the future retail/office space and take down the heavy drapes. The space flooded with light and I began to see our vision coming through. The space is about 950 square feet and has front and rear access, as well as a shared common hallway. It will make a great retail space! Over the weekend, I cleaned up the upstairs space. While it has previously been used as an apartment, we hope to find an office tenant. Most of the rooms feature beautiful crown molding and baseboards. Under the carpet are wooden floors and I hope they can be made beautiful.
Of course with any renovation, there are always surprises. The out building needs to have an entire wall reconstructed. We expected it to be our biggest problem. Surprise! Not so much. The one building has masonry problems at the top, but they are worse than expected. It seems the roof will have to be lifted on jacks and several courses of masonry replaced. Were it not triple layers of brick, I am sure that it wouldn’t be standing today. We are awaiting the report from the masonry company that inspected yesterday.
Of course, the roof is the first thing. The shingles will need to be replaced, of course, as will much of the sublayer. The structure is not sufficient to handle the weight of a planted roof, so we are looking at the options. One option would be to completely rebuild it, but I think that is cost prohibitive. Another is to add a bright colored roof to reflect light. In order to achieve LEED status, we will need it to have a high SRI value (Solar Reflectance Index). Additionally, we wanted to add solar panels to the roof, so the entire roof project is going to take a while. It makes the simple cleaning seem like a waste of time, but I feel I need to be always moving forward. I want the people in the Eco Village neighborhood to realize that we are working on the site and it will be no longer be an eyesore, but soon a thing to be proud of.
