“Everything looks good as far as I can see. There’s just one thing we may have to worry about.” He reversed his phone camera and pointed it at a spot where it appeared he’d removed some of the drop-tile ceiling and exposed the ductwork. “You see this tape?” He moved the phone and showed me a piece of yellow-brown tape.
“Yes?”
“That’s asbestos tape.”
“Ooh, that’s bad, right?”
“It’s fine as long as it’s undisturbed, which it has been under the ceiling. But now that we’re going to expose it, we have to get rid of it. And I don’t do that.”
“Who does?”
“Remediation specialists.”
“Who are expensive, I’m assuming? Though how expensive can it be to take off some tape?”
“It’s not the tape part so much, but they have to build a barrier and create a negative pressure situation, wear protective gear—it’s a whole deal.”
“Well, shit. Do I have asbestos tape in my dance studio? Why don’t I remember this being a thing?”
“Your existing studio is in a building that’s too new to have asbestos in it.”
Justin had done the work on my studio when I’d first leased the space and needed to change it from a hair salon to a dance studio, cutting me a bit of a deal because I was so young and so clearly broke—and because he’d just been starting out himself. Look at us now, embarking on a giant-ass job complete with asbestos.
“Asbestos was more a thing mid–twentieth century,” he went on. “Clearly someone did a reno on this place around that time—hence the ugly drop ceiling.”
“So we have to deal with this.”
“We do. I mean, I guess you could ask the seller to remediate it.”
“I think that ship has sailed; that should have been part of the negotiation process. Why didn’t the inspector tell me about this?”
“He should have flagged it.” He shrugged. “But it’s not the worst problem to have. It’s probably going to be a few thousand bucks, and it’s going to delay my start a bit, but it’s not the end of the world.”
“You know how you watch those reno shows on HGTV and there’s always some catastrophic surprise, like black mold or something that’s disastrously not to code?” He rolled his eyes to express what he thought of those shows. “You’re saying this is not that.”
“This is not that. With a place like this, you never know what people have been doing to it over the years until you pop the hood. This is what you get when you buy a building that’s more than a hundred years old.”
This was what you got when you bought a building that was more than a hundred years old in an attempt to cure a midlife crisis.
“It’s got good bones, though.” Justin started walking around, but his camera was still reversed. It was wild to see the space after so long away from it. From the idea of it, even. I guess the woods had really done their work.
Last time I’d been to the new building, on one of the visits I’d made when I was thinking about buying, the space had looked more like the out-of-business clothing store it had been. But now the racks and fixtures were gone, as was the huge cash desk that used to sit along one of the sidewalls. I guess the seller was getting a jump on getting rid of all that stuff.
What had once been the bones of an old store was now a blank box.
I owned this blank box. It was mine. Or at least it would be on August 31.
“I had a peek under the carpet,” Justin said, pulling back a corner of the God-knew-how-old wall-to-wall gray carpet. “I’d been hoping for hardwood, but no dice.”
“Yeah, but old hardwood is usually too wonky and uneven for dancing.” Though maybe not for yoga. I wasn’t sure about that.
Shit. Did I know enough about yoga to be opening a yoga studio?
“The underflooring seems like it’s in good shape from what I can see,” Justin said. “It will be easy enough to lay down wood, or laminate. We can talk about options, and costs.
“I do think you might consider swapping the dance and yoga areas,” he went on. “At least based on the square footage estimates you gave me.” He panned along the exposed-bricksidewall. “We can run a hallway down here.” He walked toward the back of the building. “And then we can mount those Pilates machines to this wall.” He gestured at the back wall, which was also brick.
“Yeah, but my thinking was that from the street, if people see a yoga or Pilates class going on, it will lead to walk-ins, whereas my dance clientele is going to follow me, and that side of the business is more word of mouth anyway.” I relaxed a bit. I might not know anything about yoga, but I knew marketing.
