Lawrie Forbes thinks he may really have done it this time.
Because he could not stand by and see it turned into a car park, the developer of historic Dunedin buildings bought a dilapidated 115-year-old building which generates no income, has no tenants and potentially needs hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on it.
"The scariest point was when I realised I bought it. I said to myself what the [heck] am I doing?
"But no-one's told me I'm mental yet. Well, not to my face anyway."
Mr Forbes took ownership this week of the sagging Reed's Building, at the corner of Jetty and Crawford Sts, next to Sammy's.
"We would've had another Century Theatre [a cinema which used to stand where there is now a car park at the corner of Jetty and Princes Sts] otherwise, and I just couldn't handle it. These buildings are what Dunedin is all about."
The Reed's Building is so named because it was the headquarters of what is now called Reed Publishing, from 1925 until 1940, when A.H. Reed closed the branch and retired.
Mr Forbes said the last owner of the building had intended to do it up, but did not have the funds or capability.
After years of slow decay, the building already had a notice to fix on it when he first looked around it six weeks ago, after he heard there were plans to bring down the dangerously leaning south wall.
On a closer inspection, he could see the southwest corner of the building had sunk, causing the south and west walls to crack and lean.
Other than that, it was in better condition than he expected.
So he bought it and started the work urgently required on the problem walls, even before the paperwork was signed.
The west wall has been stabilised and about 25,000 bricks are being removed, one by one, from the sagging south wall.
The wall will be rebuilt by October.
He was not sure how long it would take to restore the building, but wanted to get the work done as fast as possible.
There was "a huge job" ahead, but he was not daunted and was confident of finding a good tenant, Mr Forbes said.
His vision for the Reed's Building, which was the Otago Education Board building before Reed Publishing moved in, was that Otago Polytechnic or the University of Otago would be a tenant and house some sort of artistic or creative studies there.
"That's what I'd really like."
In the meantime, Mr Forbes said he was carrying on with the support of a "very brave" wife and his business partner, and that of the landowner, who gave him rent relief for a year, and the Dunedin City Council, which had given him $50,000 from its heritage fund towards strengthening and reusing the building, and four years' rates relief.
Council heritage planner Dr Glen Hazelton said it was great that the building was going to be saved.
He was confident the building was in safe hands and said the project would be evidence of what could be done with buildings thought to be beyond repair.
It also aligned nicely with the other work going on in the warehouse precinct to regenerate the area, he said.
