Erin and I cleaned the back floor of the shop and now I'm starting to arrange things. As I'm pulling the bigger pieces out, I'm getting a panicky feeling that my stuff is crap, it looks horrible in the shop and nobody will want anything I have. The other panicky feeling is that I do not have enough big pieces. I nickel and dime myself to death. It's so much easier to spend a quarter to make $5.00 than it is to spend $250 to make $500.00. Add that to the fact that I never seem to have $250 these days......... eBay's always been my spending money and most of my eBay-able things are packed up.
Ricky's so funny. He has his own idea about the shop. His vision is definitely not mine. He's been buying John Deere model tractors and other model things like boat motors and now boats and rods and reels. He wants to set up a large area for these things. Uh, not at all what I had in mind. My vision is cool, unique, vintage home decor. Not Cracker Barrel toys! So, Erin and I set up a corner for him - which he saw tonight while lighting the pilot light. He said, "That's all I'm getting? That one, little corner?" He sounded kinda hurt, so I said that was only tentative that he might get that whole wall and that I was pulling out rustic stuff that would look good with the tractors. Sigh. What can I do? He's put a lot of hard work into this building and is so excited to have a place to sell his collections. He thinks, and he could very well be right, that word will get out that we sell these things and people will be excited about it and the women will bring their husbands and..... all that and everything. My mission is to meld it into the rest of the store. Oh, and today, he bought a toy train with tracks at Hobby Lobby with the intention of setting it up in the shop! Ack!! Where???? There's no room for something like that! He said he might make a track up high.
He saw that we'd put a wonderful, old, rustic 3' wide door behind the shelves for the tractors and said that door needs to be hanging. Ah! For a change we agreed on something. I'm thinking, yes, hang it vertically for a nicer backdrop than just propped up in the corner. I said I agreed and wanted to do that with several doors. I wanted one to be a divider at the kitcheny area. Uh, no. I misunderstood. He thought the door should be hanging horizontally for a shelf. I do not agree with that. Not a 3' deep shelf and not showcasing the wonderful wood on the door. Not gonna happen. It's tempting, but I simply cannot boot him out. I can't break his heart. I want him in on this every step of the way. I want him as interested in this business as I am. And God bless him. He took this blank slate:
And made it look like this:
We now have storage and work areas behind those walls. Before it was all open. No storage, no place to work that people wouldn't see. I still don't know what I'm going to do with those horrible floors, but at least they're clean.
