When a historic Sydney public school was auctioned off to the highest bidder, protesters marched outside and handed out leaflets condemning the sale.

But eight years after the new owner – whose identity was a mystery – paid $2.85 million for the 1887 building and undertook an $8 million restoration, attitudes have changed.

Now, Sydney businessman Ray Newey can’t venture out of the former Enmore Public School without locals congratulating him on preserving the look of the formerly derelict three-storey brick and sandstone building with its heritage conversion into 15 apartments.

“I was part of the group concerned about it and talking to council because we all thought it would be sold off then demolished for a block of units,” says John Short, whose home backs on to the school. “But Ray has done a great job.

“It was completely rundown, full of pigeons and graffiti, someone had lit a fire inside, which was worrying as it has all wooden floors and staircases, and the gardens were completely overgrown. The envelope of the building has been kept, however, and now it’s a very lovely redevelopment. We’re all very happy that a beautiful piece of Victorian architecture has survived,” Short says.

Another neighbour, Margaret Wright, had also been outspoken about the sale of the school, especially since an elderly uncle had been a pupil there.

“People on the street weren’t happy about it at all,” she says. “We thought it would be awful. The building now looks very nice and we’re pleased there’s a photo of the old school on the plaque outside.”

Newey, 82, has been persuaded to open the doors of his building to Fairfax Media, for a look at the controversial five-year redevelopment, The Met, named after its location on Metropolitan Street.

Outside, it still has the old Boys sign from its schooldays and the stamped plaque recounting its history. It was first built for 600 students, but later accommodated 900, with an addition in 1905 and changed to a boys’ high school in the 1950s and co-ed in 1977. In 1986, it was heritage-listed, and in 1992 declared, by the Department of Education, as “surplus to needs”.

Inside, despite now being leased apartments (and where Newey and his family live), it still has the feeling of the old school, with its high pressed-metal ceilings, wooden floors, preserved wide wooden staircases, columns and old-fashioned sliding sash windows. On display in the lobby is an old blackboard, with chalk, for strata tenants to display notices.

There’s also a glass case set into the floor containing items found during the renovation work, including slateboards and slate markers the students used to scratch their letters on, along with clay ink bottles, a 1902 “entertainment” program and handmade nails, bricks and piping dating back to the original construction.

“We think a lot of things, like the slateboards, slipped down through cracks between the floorboards and were caught in the ash pugging,” says Newey, a Bankstown boy who left school at 14 without an education but had a long career working various jobs, from real estate to floristry.

“It was wonderful to be able to salvage them, clean them up and put them on display. The whole project became a labour of love. When we first got inside, we found 85 feral cats living in the building, more than 1000 pigeons – and we had to remove 10 tonnes of bird mess – all the windows were broken, there was graffiti everywhere and the place was in ruins. Not even Tafe wanted the building as they said it would cost too much to fix up.

“But the place really got to me and I wanted to restore it properly. It ended up costing so much to do that, had I sold the apartments, I would have made a loss.”

All the wood in the building had to be restored, repaired and treated for fire, as did the columns and the skirting boards. The biggest cost, at $1 million, was taking the old layers of lead paint off the sandstone and bricks. Newey had read that the Statue of Liberty in the US had been cleaned with baking soda so he tried that, only to discover that Australian baking soda is salted, which then necessitated a series of poultices to drag the salt back out.

The playground outside has been converted to lush gardens with a water feature modelled from a lion sculpture made by local John Fowler in the same year the school was built.

Heritage architect John Oultram, who worked on the project, says locals raised their concerns with him. “It was a difficult conversion,” he says. “The building hadn’t been maintained for a long time and we had to divide the classrooms into apartments, while keep as closely as possible to the original layout and use existing staircases. I thought, in the end, it was a very good job.”

The local council, now the Inner West Council, also consulted on the redevelopment and were delighted at the result. “I think it’s a really well done example of the adaptive reuse of a building that had become redundant,” said a spokesperson. “The spaces and material and style have all been well respected and the details all been conserved really well.”

The entire community is relieved they still have their old Victorian school building standing on the street, now in a new phase of its life. And none more so than Newey.

“When the neighbours finally saw how good it looked, they all hugged me!” he says. “It was a very different story to what it had been before, with people marching on the streets to say the building shouldn’t be sold. I’m very happy with it. They’ll have to carry me out of here in a box …”