Chapter Nine

The inspections began in September.

Not dramatic at first. Just polished shoes appearing at the roller door on Saturday mornings. Then Thursdays. Then random weekday drop-ins accompanied by a real estate agent with impossibly white teeth and the confidence of a man who had never cleaned a clay trap in his life.

He swept visitors through the warehouse with enormous hand gestures.

“Rare Abbotsford warehouse opportunity,” he announced repeatedly, while standing ankle-deep in pine shavings.

The studio responded in the only way it knew how.

Dawn became our first line of defence.

She timed her “landing meditations” to coincide precisely with inspections, placing herself cross-legged in the middle of the floor while the singing bowl echoed through the rafters.

“We are landing,” she intoned solemnly. “We are breathing. We are not for sale.”

One impeccably dressed couple accidentally joined the meditation circle out of politeness before the agent hurried them upright again with visible panic.

Finn preferred sabotage through entropy.

During one Thursday evening viewing, he “accidentally” tipped a slop bucket while carrying it past a prospective buyer. Grey slurry splashed beautifully across a pair of polished brogues.

Finn looked devastated.

“The beauty of collapse,” he whispered.

The man spent the remainder of the inspection glaring at his own shoes.

Ruth weaponised hospitality.

Every inspection somehow coincided with trays of sticky date pudding, shortbread or spiced cake emerging warm from the oven. Visitors arrived expecting investment opportunities and instead found themselves holding napkins while Ruth explained “community value” with alarming sincerity.

The smell of caramel and butter spread through the warehouse so aggressively that even the agent briefly lost momentum.

William took a louder approach.

He began repositioning half-finished benches directly into inspection pathways while loudly discussing “heritage carpentry preservation” to nobody in particular. One Sunday afternoon, an entire demonstration bench collapsed spectacularly behind the touring group.

William brushed sawdust from his pyjama trousers.

“Demonstration piece,” he explained calmly. “Shows the value of resilience.”

The young family nearest the staircase immediately accelerated toward the exit.

And still the inspections continued.

More polished cars. More clipboards. More conversations about development potential and mixed-use opportunities.

At the end of each tour, the agent flashed his dazzling teeth and delivered some variation of:

“You’ll need to start thinking about your next steps.”

I nodded politely and continued pretending to be mildly confused by leases.

At home, things sounded different.

Late at night, once the house had finally quietened, I sat at the kitchen table with the lease spread open beside cold tea and overdue invoices. The KC passed through occasionally on his way upstairs, rarely stopping fully.

But sometimes he left fragments behind.

“Don’t let them bluff you about forfeiture.”

Or:

“You’ve actually got options here.”

Nothing more.

Just crumbs.

I never repeated them at the studio.

There, I remained firmly in character: distracted, slightly overwhelmed, forever fussing over jumpers, glaze buckets and whether toddlers were eating clay.

Meanwhile morale inside the warehouse began fraying.

Ruth quietly floated the idea of scouting backup locations.

Finn threatened to defect to a Brunswick studio with “better artistic energy.”

Dawn insisted the building itself would eventually “choose.”

William attempted to read a poem about impermanence during a midweek inspection and was physically redirected toward the stairwell by the agent before reaching the second stanza.

Still, the warehouse held.

Each night after the final inspection ended, I swept clay dust into neat piles and watched everyone decompress around the tables: exhausted, overcaffeinated, slightly manic.

They genuinely believed the meditations, cakes and collapsing carpentry were protecting us.

Maybe they were.

Or maybe the real battle was happening quietly inside lease clauses and legal wording while the rest of the studio staged elaborate acts of communal eccentricity around it.

Either way, the war of attrition had begun.

And the strange thing was this:

the more people threatened the warehouse, the more everyone inside it behaved like it already belonged to them.