by Core Union®
In May 2025 we took on a pink shop on Bramley high street. The plan was straightforward. Clear it out, tidy it up, five reformers in, open by the autumn.
Since then a ceiling has come down, a floor has come up, a scaffold tower has fallen through that floor, five reformers have lived in a storage unit for four months, and my father has been to hospital and back.
In our defence, the air conditioning has worked flawlessly since June 2025.
May 2025
Number 11, Bramley high street. Victorian shopfront, handsome mouldings, original tiled step, and a colour best described as committed. The previous tenant's shipping-company nameplate was still in the window.
Inside was an office. Desks, filing cabinets, a world map, and a carpet the colour of a wet Tuesday.
June 2025
Every reformer, every walkway, every millimetre of clearance worked out here first. 4.28 by 6.36, ceilings just under three metres, and an arch we can tell you the depth of to the centimetre because we measured it considerably more times than was necessary.
June 2025
Not a floor. Not a ceiling. Not so much as a finished wall. The air conditioning.
There was reasoning behind it. The coffers, the ventilation runs and a good deal of the wiring all had to be planned around where the unit sat, so it went in first and everything afterwards was arranged in deference to it.
Given the summers since, it has earned its keep. But fitting air conditioning before you own a floor is not a plan. It is optimism, wall-mounted. We were building this studio from the ceiling down and I did not notice for about a year.
June — July 2025
Colour swatches. Then more colour swatches. Then the same swatches taped to the wall, so they could be looked at in a different light and disagreed about again.
This is the process by which several dozen near-identical off-whites became four: Rock salt, Just walnut, Caramel latte, Perfectly taupe. We stand behind every one and would not survive doing it a second time.
August 2025
The coffered ceiling began as biro on a sheet of A4. A 1.5 ratio, 500mm rips, and a handful of numbers that turned out — remarkably — to be correct.
Meanwhile the office contents had to go somewhere, so the garage was emptied by a man in a dust mask and his mother, who gave a thumbs up about it.
September — December 2025
There are no photographs of autumn 2025 because there was nothing to photograph. Quotes were sought. Trades were booked elsewhere. Christmas arrived on schedule, unlike everything else.
Four months, no pictures, no progress. Every build has this chapter and nobody ever puts it in the montage.
January 2026
The dust was, and this is the technical term, insane.
Underneath: century-old joists and insulation that was, to everyone's surprise, absolutely fine. Also a ceiling that turned out to be level nowhere at all — established with a laser, then corrected batten by batten across the entire room.
January 2026
Fireproof board up, battens on to form the coffers.
Normally the wiring runs above the boards. We ran ours inside the coffer voids instead — it sits cleaner and nothing ends up buried where you can't reach it. It also required roughly twice the cable anyone had allowed for. Worth it. Still irritating.
February 2026
Realised, late, that any screen in the studio needed its wiring in before the ceiling closed for good. Marked up on the wall in pencil at speed: 972 by 562, power here, 20cm across.
Another ten minutes and it would have been a genuinely expensive oversight.
February 2026
Balanced Body Allegro 2s, shipped from California, arriving at a studio with no floor and half a ceiling. Into storage they went. Just for a month or two.
My seventy-year-old father and I moved every box by hand. Somewhere around the third trolley run I remember thinking, with total sincerity, that Big Yellow is an outstanding business.
February 2026
First coats on. This is the point where a building site starts behaving like a room, and the point where I started getting properly excited — which, with hindsight, was premature.
February 2026
LED strip concealed in a shadow gap around every coffer. When Frazier the electrician switched it on for the first time, neither of us said anything for a bit.
Then we found the colour settings, and lost about forty minutes we will never recover. Red, purple, white. No regrets whatsoever.
March 2026
Almost the same week the lights went on, my father Behrouz decided the studio had had quite enough of his attention and checked himself into hospital for a rest. He'd been on site more than anyone, so, fair enough.
He is completely fine, and was. This is him partway through beating the entire ward at chess. Work restarted roughly the moment he was upright.
March 2026
Oak, spotlights on the beam centrelines, ventilation threaded invisibly through the whole thing. Getting air both into and out of a room this shape took more planning than the lighting did, and you will never notice it, which is the entire point.
April 2026
That is not a metaphor. The internal scaffold tower put a leg straight through the floorboards, and I did what anyone would do, which was crouch down and have a look.
Damp. Rot through the subfloor. Not something you patch and forget with twenty people a day on it.
So the floor came up. All of it. Underneath a ceiling that was, by this point, completely finished.
June 2026
The only honest fix was to remove the void altogether. Membrane tanked up the walls, then a reinforced slab poured across the whole footprint. No subfloor, nowhere for the damp to come back to, done properly once.
Curing time: up to twelve weeks. There is no montage for this part either.
June 2026
"A month or two" had quietly become four, at storage rates, for equipment sitting in the dark doing nothing.
I finally accepted that the studio was not about to open, hired the largest van Enterprise would part with, and moved the lot to my sister's garage. My niece supervised, and after a brief handover worked out the steering wheel faster than felt entirely reasonable.
Doing this in March would have saved a fortune. But what is the true cost of optimism.
August 2026 — now
To bring the whole floor level, one last strip of screed had to come off the old slab at the back. A thin layer, we thought. A day, we thought.
It is important to hire experts. We did not have time to hire experts.
It transpires there are three separate concrete sections back there, at three different depths, of three different hardnesses. Back to the drawing board — a place we now know well and find quite comfortable.
Floor, mirror wall, fascia. Then five reformers out of that garage and into a room that has taken fifteen months because we would rather it were right than quick.
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