Have you had an architect or construction manager engaged to help you establish a project budget? If not, your first step is to engage both a theater consultant and architect to perform a
feasibility study, and have a construction manager
throw a cost estimate at it. Granted, I do not have any familiarity with your
venue, but $5-6M for a complete overhaul of a 107-year old building seems very low. It's likely enough money to trigger requirements that you bring the building up to modern accessibility codes which will eat up a lot of budget in bathrooms, stairs, elevators,
egress pathways, ramps, exterior pathways into the building, so forth.
Is it a Historic building as deemed by a historic committee? If yes, your project budget just evaporated.
Everything is harder and takes longer in a historic renovation. I'm currently working on a project that's a
small former Federal Reserve building that'll have 2 rentable event ballrooms and a coffee shop. We will easily blow past $6M bringing the project up to code. Almost all of the electrical infrastructure needs to be torn out, and there are very firm parameters from the Historic Committee which finishes and aesthetics will be allowed that align with the original architectural styles.
In reference to your question about lighting systems, it's impossible to say without knowing your space, event types, existing systems, and other priorities. In a vacuum, anything can sound like a good idea but project budgets rarely afford that luxury. That's why you really need to hone in the overall scope and an accurate budget for your renovation. I've seen projects of similar budget where almost the entire budget has to be devoted just to meeting modern accessibility and life
safety codes and replacing
HVAC systems, electrical infrastructure, and really hitting all of the deferred maintenance items that could fail at any moment. Then a
Phase 2 gets planned a couple years down the
road where they can actually afford to start working on the interior finishes and entertainment systems.
Aside from all that, the market is in a period of high cost escalation. What used to be a $12M new construction project is now $14-15M. Costs are going up across the board. Part of planning your budget is understanding your timeline for the work to begin, and the impact of recent cost escalation. If someone is doing napkin math for you estimating that this will be $5-6M based on a project a dozen years ago, you need to adjust that for inflation -- not inflation today, but inflation up until the end of your project completion. Starts to chip away at the luxury items you can afford real fast, which is why it's important to have a qualified design team up front to make sure you're on target, on budget, and addressing the major items that you need to in this project without unnecessarily triggering modernization requirements or self-inflicting Historic review pain that'll cripple your budget and timeline. (By the way, Historic reviews can add 6-12 month to a project. Some committees only meet a handful of times a year so you need to plan your schedule around theirs and cross your fingers you do not go through any additional review cycles than you absolutely have to.)
