Holy Crow! Where has the Time Gone??? (Better late than never ;) )

Wow! Where has the time gone?? My last post, on here, was in February of 2017!!! Wow! Did I say WOW!????

Last year was a blur of all things shop build. In February 2018, I won 5th prize in a shoppe facade contest. I had thrown my hat into the contest at the very last minute with really no hopes of winning any of the prizes… I won. What? I won $5000 to improve my shoppe. Which, essentially, meant start from scratch and build a whole new shoppe. Obviously, we would have to do the work ourselves… no room in the budget for contractors, etc. Where do we start? We had no idea. My husband was asking anyone and everyone he thought might be able to help. Thankfully, one of his childhood school mates works at an architect firm and knew someone that would love to take on the job of creating a rendering of all the ideas swirling in my head… not an easy task, I assure you. But, he drew up the most amazing structure. I could not have been happier. We then had technical drawing made so we would have some idea of what we would need for building supplies. Now, came the building part… Yikes! Man, Oh man… when I say we have the best people in our family/friends circle, I’m not whistling Dixie. My brother, father-in-law and his friend a pretty much showed up every ding dang weekend to help us get it built. Thankfully, my brother has faming experience and really helped build the soundest structure possible. We, also, had help from my daughter and son-in-law (they came down from Shreveport to help), our friends and local woodworkers, Adam & Savanah (check out their business A.S. is Design). During this time, I was hunting for antique stained glass windows and doors for the shoppe… as well as a few other architectural bits. We worked every weekend until the day before opening our doors for the 2018 TRF season.