TL;DR: We expect all the legals to be ready to sign by mid August at the latest, and hopefully the first week of August.
This week I’ve been chasing Estates Management daily to get things moving. Our contact was on holiday (with snakes!) last week and unfortunately with the local flooding this week he’s had other urgent matters to attend to as well as us, leading to late nights in the office. But things are coming together now.
Sadly the University solicitor at Mills and Reeve did not hand over the Makespace file to a colleague when he went away 2 weeks ago, unlike other jobs, so there’s been no progress from him and we’ll be chasing him first thing on Monday when he’s back.
I’ve got a figure for the University’s buildings insurance for 16 Mill Lane now (very low, because the building is so empty) and even if it goes up a bit for us, the increase should be pretty small, as it will be proportional to the area we lease, which is 350m2 out of 6000m2. Final figure should be with me later today.
The electrical work to fit new check meters on our three phase circuit and 13A circuit was scheduled for the first week of July and we think it’s been done but that’s not confirmed yet.
The university will not bother charging us for lighting directly but will roll that into the general service charge (which also pays for things like the cleaning of the toilets we’ll have access to). I should have a price by the end of today.
There’s a few outstanding bits of work to do on the plans we’ll attach to the lease. We want one which shows a lot of the surrounding buildings, so our rights of way over adjacent yards and so forth can be indicated, and that needs to be prepared. Also we’ll probably transfer the licence to alter from being a narrative description of the works we want to do onto a detailed plan in the coming weeks (after checking this with Mills and Reeve on Monday).
Overall then we think 2 weeks for the legal documents to be finalised and converted to the right formats, and 2 weeks to get the plans/licence to alter sorted; these can run in parallel, and we aim to get both done by the first week in August, or mid August at the very latest. Then the package goes for signature by the University. I’ll also be working on our budget with the new figures in place to make sure we have no cashflow issues, and gearing up for some real publicity around when we get our first access to the space.