If you rent an empty space in a building and do major renovations to make it a nice office space, what should you do when you decide to move out?

Do you leave the space with the renovations in tact, or do you remove all of the renovations, leaving the space the way you found it?

In today’s story, the company owner was willing to do the first one, but for a price.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Boiler room office space

This happened in former Yugoslavia in the 80’s.

It was still a communist country but by then they started allowing for some privately owned companies limited in size.

My brother was working for one such company which made high end custom AC systems and that’s how I know about this story.

It was hard to find office space.

As this was a novel concept at the time, office space was almost non existent.

You had this huge state owned companies who had their own buildings with everything they needed including office space and outside of that there was never need.

Nothing was built with that in mind so you really needed to think outside the box for this one.

And that brings us neatly to second peculiarity of life in former Yugoslavia, apartment buildings.

There was empty space in the apartment buildings.

To keep this short at some point before, whole bunch of them where made, basically whole new part of the city and all of them had this huge space in the ground floor/first floor.

It was planed to be boiler room which was later abandoned in favor of one big heating plant to which all the buildings in that area where connected to.

As you can see where this is going owner of the fledgling company approached apartment building representatives and ask them to rent the space intended for non existing heating system.

Now these guys in this particular building where retired military officers so a little bit arrogant and not big on asking questions.

Seems like a win win for everyone.

They had no idea what was going on other than some guy was willing to give them money to rent part of building that was never used.

Not much money, but basically free money for them.

So they signed a “standard renting contract” which is very important for later.

Owner converted the boiler room to two floor office with all facilities and that was that for a while.

The owner was going to move out, but he had a proposal for the apartment representatives.

One point about this guy, he didn’t like to rent so after while when business started to pickup he started building a new factory that included much needed office space.

When this was finished and he was ready to move, he again approached apartment building representatives with proposal to pay him some of the costs of remodeling.

They could now rent for way higher price as office space was by then in high demand and for what he was asking they would be in a clear in less then a year and after that profit.

But as I said former military officers, bit arrogant, used to get their way, they thought about it and said No.

You are moving out and we are gonna get that anyways and for free.

He gutted the former office.

Owner said OK, no problem.

Gathered around all of his employees and said anything you need from former office feel free to take.

Electric plugs, toilet bowls, doors, anything that could be dismantled could be taken.

After that he brought a small excavator drove it in and started tearing place clean.

By then building representatives are running and screaming bloody murder, threatening to call police (militia then), legal actions, everything and anything

The owner couldn’t do anything about it.

Owner calmly takes out the “standard renting contract” with highlighted “premises to be returned to original state after renting period”

Now there is something poetic about bunch of entitled, arrogant jerks being messed with and knowing they can’t do nothing about it.

My brother says it was glorious!

I wish I was there to see it.

Also I’m happy to say that company managed to survive Balkan wars of 90’s and is still going strong to this day 😀

He did what he was supposed to do, nothing more, nothing less.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Here’s a boiler room pun.

This reader loved the last sentence.

I read it in a Russian accent too!

This reader loves the story.

If the contract says to leave it the way you found it, what did they expect?

They were just following the rules.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.