Part 3: Removing Walls and Rewiring
Merit House may look tired, but structurally it’s solid — reinforced concrete columns and floors, built in an era when overengineering was still fashionable.
The first real physical step was simple in theory:
remove the internal partition walls and strip the building back to an empty shell.
When choosing contractors, I follow a slightly unfashionable rule:
I check their credit status.
My reasoning is straightforward. If a company is financially stressed, the pressure usually trickles down to the workmanship. That’s when corners get cut.
However, I made an exception: I picked a small contractor on MyBuilder. A new company, but the boss and his son were both certified electricians — a useful advantage, because a large amount of cabling, lighting, and fire alarms needed rerouting.
Their quote was about £10,000, roughly 40% cheapeer than the builder I’d used before.
Overall, I think I made the right call — though not without frustration.
There were holes left in ceilings, unexpected skip overweight charges (about £5,000 extra), and a general lack of finesse. But having electricians on site helped enormously. They could quickly reroute lighting circuits, fire alarms, and install additional power points for the smart systems I had planned.
The real issue with new contractors isn’t competence — it’s finish.
My main headaches:
1. Dust. Everywhere.
Despite covers and repeated reminders to keep doors closed, dust found its way into everything. I eventually hired three cleaners for three days to jet-wash the entire building.
2. Holes and cracks.
Promises were made. Deadlines slipped. In the end, my own staff fixed many of them.
3. Delays.
Partly my fault — I was too tolerant. Small contractors juggle jobs to survive, and while my project waited on planning permission, others felt more urgent.
By the time the partitions were gone and the electrics rerouted, the building looked dramatically different — open, echoing, full of potential.
You might think we were ready to install the storage units.
Not quite.
This was only the beginning.
free to follow my BSS journey — a real, unfiltered account of building an independent self storage business in the UK, one problem, mistake, and hard-won solution at a time.
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