Walk It Twice

The Workroom · Venue Evaluation System

One walk in working daylight, with a tape measure, starting at the loading dock. One walk at the hour the event actually happens, when the light is what the guests will get and the room is doing what rooms do after dark. A venue that survives both is a venue. A venue that only survives the first is a photograph.

The tour is a sales presentation until you turn it into an interview

You are shown a room with the blinds open, the house lights up, an empty parking lot and no neighbors home. Somebody with a key and a script walks you through a space that has been staged to agree with you. Forty minutes later you remember the light, and you have forgotten to ask who owns the folding chairs, what is already drawing on the panel on a Saturday night, and whether the accessible route is a route or a ramp in a closet.

Then the contract is signed, and the building stops negotiating.

These forms are how you ask before it does. Thirteen forms: nine walks in the order the building gives them to you and a second walk after dark, a one-page on-site reference for the arithmetic you cannot look up on a loading dock, the ten questions that expose the real event, and a sign-off sheet that turns the walked pages into a record somebody else can rely on.

A fact with no name against it is a rumor with a checkmark beside it

Every form carries three marks rather than one: P where the room passes for the event you are actually planning, F where it fails, and ? where you could not check. A question mark is not a pass. It stays visible, it goes on the sign-off sheet, and you do not sign a contract with any of them outstanding.

Two of these are vetoes rather than deductions. A failed accessible route and a failed egress are not outweighed by a beautiful room. Everything else on the comparison is a trade; those two are not.

Form 01 is below, in full and free

So you can see exactly what the other twelve are like before you decide. Print it, take it to your next site visit, and see whether it changes the conversation.