Ready to open July 2005

I took so many pictures as we progressed, it was hard to decide which ones to add. As you can see we are getting closer to opening here. The bottom picture is of the part of old bar floor I was able to salvage. Just scrubbed it good and put a coat of wax on it. The middle one is of the boxes of books that I bought from a guy, sort of site unseen, about 3,000 and it turned out pretty well. I threw away alot in the dumpster, now wish I had known about taking them to the recycle center. The top picture is looking at the front door from the inside. I felt very pleased with myself at this point.

Progress continues

So the lower picture is of the inner wall by the brick chimney. All old lath and plaster. We salvaged the old brick work, yeah, that's me chiseling away. I sprayed a clear gloss on it after it was all cleaned up. We put peg board around the open bottom, and covers over the holes that were where stove pipe would have gone.; My inspiration for color came from a trip to Walmart and I saw someone mixing paint for another customer. The color looked yummy enough to eat. It was Raspberry, so I had to have some. That is the bathroom door. To go with the bright cheery color theme, I added Candy Apple Green, Lemon Yellow, and Grape something. See the food connection going on here. I also collect bird houses, so you will see more of that later on. Enough for this post.

Lots of elbow grease used

Here are some pictures of our restoration. That's brother down in the hole. This section of flooring was rotted out from where the beer coolers sat. So it was all pulled out. I will p0st a picture later of some of the original bar floor that we did salvage. About half of the area. The other 2 pictures are before and after of the side and back of the building. Brother got to practice with some stucco work where the old windows came out in this area.

So that's it for today. I do want to say that the weeks that we spent working on this building were fun for me. I enjoyed working with my brother and learned alot from him. Also it felt good to be doing alot of hands on myself.

In the beginning

Since this is a new site dedicated to my book store, I feel it is only right to start out from the beginning and tell how I decided to start the store and what it looked like when I bought it. I hope I can figure out how to post more than one picture in the right order.

While I was still living in Nevada and thinking about retiring from my nursing career, I went into a used book store that was next door to the gym I was going to. It was one of those spur of the moment things. As I walked in I told the guy there that I sure wish I had a little book store like his. Well he proceeded to tell me how he could set me up as a franchise and stock books to get me going, blah, blah, blah. I went away thinking yeah, right I am not crazy enough to be a franchise and pay him monthly for something I could do my self.

So the seed was planted. A couple weeks later I ran into a gal in the grocery store parking lot, well I didn't really run into her! But she was loading groceries and had a dog in her back seat that looked so much like our Molly, a red heeler. So I commented to her about the dog and we got to chatting, found out she had a little used book store in the next town south of Carson City, and she invited me to come down and spend some time with her and she would teach me what ever I wanted to know. Since I was planning to move out of state I would be no competition to her. So that's just what I did. I made a friend and she taught me her system of selling books and doing trade ins. I took pictures of her shelving, measured, took notes, etc.

When we did move back to Missouri that next year, my sister and her husband had an empty building for sale in this little old town in SW Mo. It had been the old White Spot, a local watering hole for many years, maybe 40 years or more. Only about 500 square feet.

Well I took my savings that I had been contributing to from my 8 years working as a nurse in corrections and that was my seed money to buy the building and put a new roof on it. Later on my brother worked with me (or me with him) and we gutted the building, replacing all the windows and doors, insulation, wiring, plumbing, sheet rock, and shelving. Took out 2 stinking old bathrooms and put in one. Saved the little kitchen area and made it my office space.

So I will stop here and post a couple pictures of what it looked like back in 2005 when we started.

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Welcome to my world of books

I will be building on this site in the days to come. This is my little book store located in Granby Missouri. Established in 2005, it has been my retirement dream come true. Please come back to learn more. Thanks for checking me out.