Building the lab we always wanted: the year we moved

Another summer has come around, which means our new classroom has now been in use for a full year.

It's not something we've said much about publicly. There was never really the time, and the details might seem trivial. But we wanted to make a record of it — because building a classroom is genuinely harder than people imagine. You can't just find any old house and open the doors.

Two years, nearly every listing in town

Our old place had long since outgrown us, so about four years ago we started thinking about moving. The requirements were actually few:

• A road that's easy to pull over on, so parents can drop off and pick up by car.
• A single room of at least 100 square metres — because our lead teacher no longer had the hours to open additional classes.
• A layout that meets the licensing regulations for a tutoring centre.

Few requirements — but the second one alone nearly finished us. In Tainan's townhouses, the staircase usually sits in the middle of the building, so even with a large footprint, the individual rooms come out small.

Over those two years of searching, we saw very nearly every property on the market, and met our share of odd characters along the way — landlords and agents who, more than once, drove us up the wall. In the end we put out a public notice asking for help. And it turned out our families really do come through: through one parent's introduction, we found a genuinely reliable agent, and only then did we land the classroom we're in now.

Eight weeks, gutted and rebuilt

We took possession in early summer. Our second child was born two weeks after we got the keys — and summer classes were due to begin that same early July.

Put like that, you can probably picture how intense those weeks were. A woman on the verge of giving birth, still pacing the demolition site, still going back and forth with the designer over partitions and materials — next to everything else, that part hardly registered.

Anyone who's renovated will know how daunting it is to strip out the old fit-out of an entire townhouse — all the more so when the building was previously a guesthouse, full of partition walls. The wiring was old and chaotic, so for safety's sake we simply cleared the whole building and redid it from scratch. Put simply: apart from the lift and the stairwell, everything was torn out and rebuilt.

Demolition alone took three weeks, longer than expected, leaving five weeks for the fit-out — and we very nearly worked our contractors into the ground. The final work wrapped in the small hours of the morning that classes began. A few hours later, students and parents would walk through the door.

Through all of it, even from postpartum recovery, the phone and the laptop never stopped. Our lead teacher was shuttling between three places — the recovery centre, the new classroom, the old one — with evening classes still running as normal. On top of that, the move and the prep for summer camp were happening at the same time. We remain in awe that our team didn't lose their minds keeping up with that punishing pace.

Why the spec has to be this high

The new classroom is finally on an even keel. We still have plenty of plans waiting on savings to make real — those two big walls on the ground floor, for instance; one day, maybe, an enormous dinosaur fossil.

We're writing this to keep a record, and to let people see how a genuinely professional science classroom actually comes into being. A space at this spec, dropped into a prime downtown district, would likely mean doubling tuition. Some things others might cut. We can't.