Yesterday we saw our sample flooring for the first time and it was great. Putting the new samples down over the current flooring you can immediately see the difference it’s going to make in the whole building. If we can’t do anything else in the whole place, we’ll be proud of the improvements we made just in flooring alone. Of course it’s more than we wanted to spend but when you’re putting down quality stuff over 12,000 sq/ft. of building it’s going to get pricey.
We also made a major breakthrough with the audio department build out. Until the day before yesterday we were struggling to find an experienced person locally who has designed and/or built an audio studio. The challenge is that the people we have talked to elsewhere won’t get on a plane to see the space unless they got paid. Our desire was to have a qualified person walk the proposed space and tell us we could or could not do what we wanted to do for the budget we have. David Bain found an experienced person locally who came to the building yesterday to walk the space, listen to what we wanted and is going to give us a proposal for his services. From that we’ll definitely know whether we can do what we want to do with the budget we have.
We also met with the city of Orlando permitting office to walk them through the building to make sure the direction we are going with the build out won’t lead to permitting problems. The walk through went remarkably well. It appears we have done our homework relatively well to make sure we’re not shooting ourselves in the foot by trying to do things that will open up other issues.
We appear to be close to getting final bids from potential contractors so a lot of decisions are going to be made in the next week or so. With any luck the physical build out process should start in early February.
I was also able to shoot the flooring meeting and general b-roll for our Making Of video. Stay tuned for that.
As far as the actual lease goes, it appears as if we’re close to getting final word on whether we’re going to be able to sign a lease any time soon with the Tribune Chapter 11 issues. Man will it stink if we are doing all this work getting bids and we end up not at this building.
