What’s On The Inside

By Thomas Dunagan

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Location, location, location. Outside of the product and customer service, this may be the most important part for finding success in the small business world. So I knew what my goal was, but if I couldn’t find a good location then there was no chance I was going to gamble trying to get this business off the ground. I trekked through all parts of Helen including the downtown walking area, down corridors, back roads, and empty old restaurants. To some dismay options were fairly limited that would fit my needs. I knew I wanted to start with a larger space and grow into it. I also wanted to ensure my guests could find our location and it be easily accessible.

A little backstory on my conquests of experiencing several different escape rooms and learning about the pros and cons of what I see in those businesses. One of my biggest gripes is location. You will find more often than not escape room companies are placed in really oddball locations. Many of which are designed for office space and they all look the same. I get it though those spaces are perfect to implement escape rooms. The walls are already divided out with rooms, hallways and bathrooms. The bigger drawback is how off the beaten path they are.

So in knowing the risks of what I wanted to avoid I did find a location that is quite suitable for my needs. A wide open 4000 sq ft space that has good road signage and great parking to the front and rear of the building. Every person that drives up from the south into Helen will see The Lost Room. This location had two major obstacles I had to overcome. The space only had one bathroom and it had one back wall with a 10 ft drop ceiling in the entirety of the space.

I contracted out a plumber to jackhammer the floor to run a new piping for another bathroom as well as a kitchen sink. For us it was 400 2×4’s, 300 sheets of drywall, 100’s of feet of trim and moulding, 1600 sq ft of tile, over 15 gallons of paint, and well over 7500 nails, screws and brads to fully assemble the place. It’s hard to put into words the work involved with essentially two people to put all of that together.

The next post I will discuss about the design process of how I create and develop escape rooms. You may get some insight into our debut room, The Master Key! Thanks for reading.