One of my recent posts discussed the floors in the building we are looking to lease.  You can read it by clicking here.  Essentially, the floors are in need of some repair and upgrades, and we are going through the process of figuring out how much it will cost versus what we have in the budget.

When I look through our financials, we have a set amount of money to spend on pouring cement, upgrading floors and making changes to the foundation.  If we want to spend more money than is in this pot, we either have to take it from somewhere else, or we have to raise more money.  Raising extra money is not ideal for 1 main reason.  If you indicate to investors that you are going to need $1,000,000 to start, and you value your company based on that, it is hard to go back to them and tell them that the shares they thought were worth $1.00 each, are now worth something less, like $0.80 each.

Given this, we have raised what we think is a realistic number and based our valuation on a few worst case scenarios.  Hopefully only a few of these come to fruition, and you are left with a little extra cash to spend on items you were off in your estimates.  So all this leads to our floors:  We have about $75,000 for flooring in our space, and after what we found out today, it is likely going to be a little low.

So where to take money from?  The only logical place is either wages or marketing.  That means either I am going to have my salary delayed even longer, or we are going to rely on word of mouth for advertising.  Neither option is ideal, but what else can we do?  We can’t cut equipment costs, and god forbid we cut our raw material costs!

Anyhow, we cut and opened the floors in our space, and I wanted to share those pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, we had to cut the floor in order to see what’s below.  Here is an action shot of the machine in use.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can imagine how loud this bad-boy was.  It did the trick and gave us a nice little .75 metre x .75 metre section to see below.

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the hole at grade.  It looks like there is a gap of about 5 cm’s between the top of the substrate and the bottom of the slab.  In other words, there is nothing holding up the floor …. it is essentially a suspended slab = Not Good!

 

 

 

 

 

A lot of soil came out of this hole …. I was looking for solid ground and could find none!  Finding hard ground would be great as we could use this ground to put new footings in, and then put a new slab into the space; however, ……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I dug for 2 metres and still couldn’t find hard ground.  Shovelling the last of the dirt out was next to impossible , not to mention how dangerous is was being in such a deep hole, so I could dig no further!  The next step is to use the probe and see if you could hit solid ground below.

 

 

 

 

 

OK, so we went to the bottom of this 2 metre deep hole with the probe, to see if we could hit solid ground.  The probe went down and down and down …. all 2.5 metres of it.  There was no solid ground to be found …. WTF.

So what this means is that there is about 4.5 metres of fill under this slab, with no sign of firm ground.  This is very upsetting and something we were really disappointed to find out <insert sound of air leaving a balloon>.

What does all this mean.  Well like everything else with opening a brewery, it means likely more money and time, and it will also mean that we need to re-evaluate this space.  If the potential cost of fixing these floors is much beyond our budget, we won’t move ahead with this space.  So now we will wait for the Geotechnical Engineers report, in addition to the Structural Engineers report, but at this point, its not great news.

As you can tell, everything is resting on these floors.