The teams instructions were clear, meet in the car park and Tom will have the key. A few days before I'd been in contact with Tom, the keeper of a property which on paper seemed too good to be true. A low rent and rate, near enough to the station and bus routes to make it's slight out-of-town location not to concerning. Better still this space has parking and the Victorian artisan charm that I really like.
Tom opened up a door wedged closed by the weight of letters from the Inland Revenue that the former tenants are probably happy not to get any more. I don't know if anyone was watching but at this point my face dropped. The lower room was dark and damp. The walls festooned with iron bracketing for storing lumber. A broken (well if it isn't I'm not switching it on) gas heater hanging, abused from the non-to-safe looking ceiling. To the left of the door is a small (very small) office with a BT Viscount phone in original Beige (no dial tone).
I ask Tom about the ablutions, there are non. I ask Tom how we get to the upper floor and he takes us back outside and shows us the a very steep fire escape stairs. Up we go. We enter the upstairs room which has the most gorgeous bow topped windows, letting in a lot of light on a sunny April day at two o'clock. This room feels bigger (though it can't be) and drier. A suspended ceiling is bowed and deformed with damp above our heads. The rough thick floorboards have several large gaps allowing us to see the room below. At the far end of the room a kitchenette with tap!
The power sockets hang rusting from the wall and at least their is a fire alarm system. It doesn't take a huge amount of dream fuelled imagination to picture the space in full swing on a hack night!
Alas though, we'd out grow it so quickly. If given the space on a tiny peppercorn rent, our list of demands before we could move in...
- Fix power and lighting
- add toilet
- Fix roof
- Survey for soundness
- Fix floor
...would not make this appetising for the landlords, and we know we'd use any money we could raise patching the place up before we'd even got a soldering iron to share. Truth is the Hackspace would become the project and not hacking.
Over a cup of coffee back at Doc Little's workshop we chewed over these facts. The trip had been useful as a reality check for me. I now understand what your $$ can get you, how big it looks and what sort of a state it might be in. There is another much larger (and who knows better) space at the same site which we'll have a look round. It's 3x the price of course...
At least we now know what to ask for and how much discount and funding we'll need! Leave a comment below or let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas about our future home, where ever it may be!
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