Breaking Ground

I know, I know, I know. I'm jumping around a bit aren't I?

I am sorry, it's just that it can be quite tricky doing these things in retrospect.

Timelines get wobbly, because you have this idea in your head where you know what the main events were. You know, the big ones that were so major. But some of the smaller ones get pushed aside. Shunted to the back of the queue because they seem more trivial than the big ticket items. Until you start really thinking about the details. The little steps that took you toward the big steps. The small decisions, that when you add them all up become the big deals.

So you have to backtrack a bit and then there are the details that you go back and fill in once you've got the bullet points nutted out.

This one's a big one though. As in October we got an email which honestly had me spinning out pretty majorly. As it was so unexpected.

We had a timeline, which was that we should be expecting construction to begin in march 2020.

And we were slowly working toward that goal, with no idea of what was about to shake things up. We had slowly been dismantling and moving things and making all those detail plans about how to keep the business running and life functioning with less space and construction teams on site.

And then we got an email which said very succinctly (yeah thanks Lorenzo. Dick.) that we needed to vacate the building in less than one week as Maycroft were going to be taking over the building as a worksite that Friday.

No other notice.

Panic buttons were pressed and I admit, I lost it! I thought there was absolutely no way we could get moved and the last of the demo done in 5 days.

So while we kicked into gear pretty quick and wanted to at least give it the old college try, I also emailed back asking if we could defer it a little longer as we had so much to do.

Luckily for us, they agreed to giving us an extra week.

-sigh-

It was all hands on deck and as you read in the other post about emptying the building there were hilarious and challenging moments, but I was so proud of us for achieving what I had thought was impossible.

I'm so glad we work as a team so well, and it seems that no matter what challenges we face, we just get stuck in and we get this shit on lockdown.

Absolutely nothing can deter us when we get single minded and the people who say teamwork makes the dream work? 100% correct!

We might argue and yell sometimes, but we don't go to bed mad, and we are always brutally honest about our feelings. And we work damned hard to make sure that each other is always heard and that we try to negotiate compromise wherever we can on those rare occasions where we don't agree on something.

Our team work, meant that at the end of October 2019, instead of being blissfully unaware of the impending building works, instead, we got to see the most exciting things.....

Part of it was kind of sad, the last time we got to stand in our empty building, looking up and realising that it was the last time we were going to lock up that particular building.

That it was essentially no longer ours - it belonged to Maycroft now.

And that we were going to be kept on the outskirts, as we watched it change and develop.

Partly it was kind of exciting, knowing that this old girl was going to become a whole new, safe and secure premises. And that she was going to birth a whole new generation of memories, love and laughter in the home she was going to wear as her mantle.

Partly it was very scary knowing that so many memories were going to be torn apart. Ripped out and thrown away. Recycled into something with less history and personality.

And when D-Day came we got to watch them lock the doors on us, locking us out. Which was a lot less eventful than I thought it would be if I'm honest....

It actually took a few weeks before we started to see things happening, because initially things didn't move so fast.

They moved in a couple of site offices out the back, added locks that we had no keys to on the gate and doors.

They had a lot of behind the scenes work happening which I can't even bear the gravity of even now, but I look at all of the safety things that happened, fences, scaffolding, signage, security... and I know all of those had processes and plans behind them.