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Building our premises
"The most stressful thing you can do is move house"
I'd beg to differ.
How about:
"The most stressful thing you can do in life is build premises and then move your business into them"
Ok, not quite as eloquent, but I think it sums it up pretty well.
It started a couple of years before, realising that we had outgrown our original town centre location we poured over particulars but we just couldn't find the right combination of factors -
Every interesting premises we spied was spoken for, but just before we gave up hope it appeared (pictured above) -
Our plan revolved us tackling as much as we could ourselves, with Mark (the other half of Deco Audio) being rather more practical than I but still no builder by trade. What followed was a very steep learning curve, naturally we farmed out those things that could best be done by experts -
As anyone who has watched Grand Designs will know, like all ambitious plans things can go rather over budget and over time scales and we spent 14 months with every conceivable spare hour spent putting up walls, swearing, fitting plasterboard, swearing some more and then finally preparing for the big move (which when it involves many thousands of LPs and a huge amount of hi-
Whilst the exact figures allude me, we used many miles of timber, well over 12 tonnes of plasterboard, over a mile of jointing jointing tape and quarter of a mile of skirting boards.
Here’s some pics of the process for anyone who’s curious:
Above: A big early step forward in the build, the mezzanine arrives and is installed
Above: The result with the first floor complete, the hole in the middle is for the spiral staircase.
Above: How does this go together?
Above: We got there in the end, the spiral staircase is installed. This seriously over engineered steel staircase came out of a University. It required a bit of modification for our uses before being painted. Like most things on this job is was much heavier than expected, weighing in at about 2 tonnes.
Above: Dubbed the great wall of Deco, I was delighted that our carpenter built this as it was terrifying me (you can just see him on the far right which gives you an idea of scale)
Above: The wall after being covered with two layers of plasterboard on both sides -
Above: The Showcase demonstration room taking shape (left) and almost from the same angle after completion on the right
Above: The ground floor showroom almost completed
Above and below: So there we have it, a new custom designed home for Deco Audio, with three demonstration rooms, showrooms over two floors, a four metre long coffee bar (nicknamed ‘Cafe Deco’), space for records and large service facilities.