Friend actually made it out last evening, and he, hubby, and I tossed around several different ideas, working with the space available. There's a post in the middle of the floor, which the building owner INSISTS can't come out because he thinks it's a weight-bearing post, but our friend says it isn't. We tossed around ideas for a while, and I brought up the fact that it probably wouldn't be a good idea to come into a new lease telling the guy who's owned the building for over 8 years that he's "wrong" about it, so we decided to work around the post.
We got a decent floor plan decided on that will give us three nice-sized rooms (one large enough for couples massages), a nice reception/retail area, a chair massage area, a "relax and recoup"/client education area, and an employees' breakroom/kitchen area that has a sink and incorporates one of the two bathrooms for "employees only", but it will be within the breakroom area so only we will even know about it.
We've also figured out that we can put a stacked laundry set in the closet next to the public bathroom (so not far to go at all for the washer plumbing), and that saves the larger, 8' x 8' room for storage/office.
With the post in the way and the way the doors and windows are laid out, this is going to be the best workable floorplan without making the treatment rooms too small to work in comfortably. If we can rent out one of the rooms that'll be fantastic; otherwise/until then, we each (DS, DH, and I) will each get our own treatment room.
Our friend says that he thinks it'll take about a week to build and maybe a couple of days to do the floor (it's painted cement now- we'll probably do peel- n- stick vinyl tiles in the treatment rooms with rugs over that and some sort of inexpensive short carpet in the "public" areas), and we'll need a day or so to paint, I guess.
We will have to hire a city-registered electrician and plumber for the small amount of "specialty" work that will need to be done, and the cost and timing will also depend on their part, as well as the city inspection stuff that'll need to happen before we can get our certificate of occupancy, but we should be able to open up before the end of February for sure, hopefully closer to the middle of the month (maybe run a Valentine's special in conjunction with the Grand Opening?).
Oh, and I still need to take my test. Hopefully that can happen before we open too, so that I'll basically only be waiting on the official license paperwork to arrive by then.