This past school year moved at record speed. It’s been more than a year since my husband (Michael) and I made a decision to secure YCCA’s future with a permanent home. Once we made that decision, my days were filled with not only the busy everyday life at YCCA and home, but by the enormous task of seeking and purchasing a suitable location and completing all of the necessary documents needed to get the financing that would bring us to a closing date for our second location. Meeting with our accountant and attorney it was decided that Michael and I form an LLC to purchase the property and then lease it to YCCA. We took it one giant step forward by taking out the loan for the construction project, to the tune of $368k. YCCA is a 501c3 nonprofit and while I am the Founder, President of the corporation and Executive Director of the school, YCCA does not ‘belong’ to anyone. Clearly, we couldn’t risk using our home equity line of credit, personal assets and collateral to get a loan for a half million dollar construction project for our tenant (YCCA) unless we secured a long term lease with YCCA. The bank felt the same way. So, Michael and I divided up the work to achieve our goal. It was my job to gather all of the financial statements including P&L’s, financials, and budgets for YCCA, updating all legal documents, etc., and it was Michael’s job to provide the bank with documentation of our personal finances, including collateral that would ultimately lead us to securing a mortgage and construction loan. Working with our realtor, Stephanie Slapin (Keller Williams), we found the property in May, put in our offer in June, and began the ordeal of building inspection after building inspection to be sure that we would be able to transform it into a state-of-the-art early childhood center. We hired Kait Midgett (‘Star Contracting”) to be our Project Manager. (In fact, Kait came to see every property we looked at in order to advise us as to the feasibility of its transformation into a second location for YCCA and 2014-20 S. 2nd Street – the old “Norman’s” – met with her approval.) We went to settlement in February and began demolition a week later. Kait has navigated us through every aspect of our construction project always keeping in mind our goal to open in September (without compromising quality of workmanship) and while adhering closely to our budget constraints.
READY, SET, GO!
To get started, we needed to hire an architect so that we could get our permit plans and then, of course our permits. Unfortunately, we had a few bumpy rides with architects who didn’t quite get both the scope of our project and the absolute necessity to adhere to our timeline. Nor did they understand our need to create a space that is perfectly compliant with both L&I regulations and Daycare Licensing regulations like: forty square feet per child means forty square feet per child and not thirty-eight. (A room that is four-hundred square feet from wall to wall is licensed for ten children. A room that is three-hundred ninety-five square feet is licensed for nine children – and that means that we just lost the revenue from one more family!) Fortunately, upon the recommendation of a YCCA architect mom (Natalie Malawey-Ednie) we found our current architect, David Whipple (Assimilation Design Lab). It didn’t take long for David to take off his typical architect shoes – the ones with a bit more carte blanche for creativity of design, form, and budget – and slip into preschool / daycare architect shoes – the ones that keep you walking in straight lines that fall within the dimensions of “40 sq ft per child”. David would be excited with a beautiful design idea he came up with and before he could even pitch it to us he would see our heads shaking in disapproval as we reminded him of our tiny clients’ and their great big need to keep things simple, or of our very tight budget. I’ve learned about footers and headers, pipes and drains, HVAC and so much more, and the best part is that I am well acquainted with every square inch – and I really mean every square inch – of 1714-20 S. 2nd Street aka “YCCAon2″. Please continue to check back here each week with our updates on YCCAon2!
YCCA and YCCAon2 