It’s been a couple of weeks since the Town Hall and the summary I shared and after tons of support, excitement, and creative brainstorming about how we want to tackle our next steps we’ve achieved an important milestone:

Our new lease is signed. Adding the first floor to Indy Hall is a go.

What does this mean? It means that on June 1st our lease begins and we’ve got a whole bunch of things to do between now and then (not the least of which is celebrate!).

Now that the lease is signed, we’ve got a lot to do!

First – if you’ve been thinking about prepaying membership and haven’t talked to myself or Adam about it, now’s a great time :)

Next – thank you to the people who’ve contacted me about interest in providing loans. Now that we can focus on the specific projects for the redesign and the costs associated with completing them, we’ll have a better feel for not just how much money we need but what we need it for. More on that front very, very soon.

What’s happening next:

• The landlord is clearing out the entire 1st floor. All of the partitions, stuff, and the walls that divided the former DeTours space and the rest of the space are being removed. We expect that to be complete by the end of this week.
• An engineer is coming in to evaluate the location options for the connecting stairs. We need this done ASAP so we can submit for the permits to have the hole cut. The hole itself is likely to be a few weeks out due to the permits process.
• We need to get to work on thinking about the layout of the space. As we’ve said before, it’s best to think about this as a “redesign” of Indy Hall more than an expansion. We need to account for use on both floors, the team rooms, the classroom, security and flow, etc. Kevin Lee’s been working on Google SketchUp drawings of the 1st and 2nd floor so we’ll have the ability to easily lay out ideas and options but we do want to make this a co-design process. We’ll be announcing dates for a couple of open design sessions in the next 2 weeks, so watch out for those and please try to get involved if you’re interested. The sooner we have our initial ideas drafted, the better off we’ll be in terms of planning the rest of the build.

This is really just the next couple of weeks, but I’d like to be thinking a step or two ahead or finding ways to do some planning in parallel for the things we can’t do just yet (networking & media, lighting, furniture, decorations, etc).

If you’re interested in any of those topics (or other topics you think might be related to the move but I didn’t list), let us know so I can add you to the other Basecamp where we’ll be spinning up more project-specific discussions.

We’ll keep posting updates like these as often as they make sense. Hopefully they’ll be shorter and with less time between them.

Once again, thanks to everyone for the excitement and support over the last 2-3 weeks. Here comes the really fun part.