The Biggest Renovation of our lives

I am going to be honest and I didn’t not fully understand what all it would take to get our jail up and running as a commercial building. Me and my Dad, James Melvin, had renovated a handful of historic house together on the weekend just as as side hustle. But this was an entirely different category of renovation.

We knew we had to call in the experts. We hired an architect, structural engineer, and general contractor. Not the kind of contractor that comes to remodel your bathroom at home, we hired the guys that build our new YMCA from the ground up. But all of that was super expensive plus the budget for the renovation, so we knew we would have to take on every project we could to help save money.

I documented the entire process on Tik Tok. The Historic Dallas Jail currently has 46k friends following our adventure.

We learned how to sandblast, we painted every inch of the building ourselves, we clean and sprayed the ceilings, we laid all the flooring, learned how do do plaster repair, patched concrete floors, striped so much paint, if there was a YouTube video on how to do something we learned how and did it.

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the renovation.