WAITING FOR INFO
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been stacked out with pricing, drawings and other office stuff which isn’t too interesting, the pricing is exciting and positive but hopefully I’ll have news on that soon. We’ve been patiently waiting for a couple of jobs to be ready for site measurements so while we have been waiting the lads have been cracking on with our home project which has been simply code named ‘UNIT 4’. We’re nearly finished and there’s a lot to tell so I’ll break it down over a few posts so I don’t bore you to tears.
BACK STORY
At JFW Ltd Global HQ we reside in Units 5 and 6 Veasey Close, John purchased Unit 6 back in 1989 and Unit 5 in 1998. We’ve always been a bit pushed for space and over the past few years we’ve been having to build some pretty large items like counters and bookcases so when the opportunity to purchase Unit 4 came up we just had to grab it with both hands. Unit 5 was occupied by a lovely couple who ran various business’ out of it, from a shoe shop to a courier business with room for a vehicle lift to fix the courier vans. So it was no understatement that the place was a bit of a rabbits warren of offices, stores and workshops but functioned perfectly for them.
They were looking to sell the unit and move away for their retirement, so we made offers and agreed, all the formalities were sorted and to cut a very long story short we completed in July last year. As you may remember we were crazy busy back then and didn’t have time to even look in the place, which worked for our neighbors as they had a lot of work to do to get the place cleared. So we were able to get proper access in August!
THE PLAN
Paula and I share a little office in Unit 6, it has been the main office for us since 1989 and has grown a little impractical because of the introduction of modern technologies and processes, so we were looking to build an extension to make the office bigger, however when Unit 4 became available we had lots of new space to use. So, we planned to split the workshop in half, keep the left hand side open for extra workshop space and the other half would house 2 ground floor offices which would be rented out to small businesses needing a base, a communal kitchen area and toilets and the first floor would have our new office and meeting room. The meeting room would be very important for us as we currently don’t have anywhere to meet customers, reps or other visitors, so a meeting room would be perfect.
This would also be a huge opportunity to improve our infrastructure, so we planned to implement new phone lines and data lines future proofing us for what the 21st century intends to throw at us. We also planned to future proof as much as possible with power and data, insulation and air con. I’ll touch on this in a future post.
OUR MISSION: DEMOLITION
First though, we had to rip out everything that was already there and get back to the bare bones, so armed with sledgehammers and crowbars, Charlie and Josh went crazy knocking the place apart! 
Once it was pretty much an empty shell, we had to move the position of the stairs, so Josh and I dismantled the stairs and cut a hole in the floor. We had to re position some steels and posts but nothing too stressful. Then we had to rebuild the stairs in their new position and bolt them down to the floor and onto the steel trimmer. It took many hands to get these sections into place, but once bolted in we could progress with the rebuild!
TO BE CONTINUED…….