Laid Off and Loving it....

Summertime and no job. Life is good. I could get use to it.

Tomorrow I'm headed downtown for a 3-hour seminar put on by the Tacoma Chamber of Commerce on "Small Business Startup:101".

Mark and I are getting more and more serious and taking steps toward our dream of having a pottery studio/art gallery.

We looked at a house a week or so ago that has some potential for what we want. It's in the most sought after shopping area in Tacoma for small stores and it's about a mile from our house. But the owners are asking a lot of money for the house since it's zoned commercial and they bought at the height of the market and are trying to sell it for more than they paid, of course. Thanks to the Internet I know how much they bought it for and how much the City has assessed that property ...which is about $90,000 less than what they're asking. We got real excited about it for awhile, but after discussing it over several days we came to the realization that there's way too much work and too much $$$ to make it what we want. It would be years before we ever saw a profit on that.

There's a couple of other spots that we're looking at. We know the areas that are acceptable to us - all North end of Tacoma. One place is a small storefront in a funky shopping area, also not far from our house. It's for sale at a reasonable price, but Mark isn't sure of the location. It's almost too funky for him ;-) Although the area is really busy with new restaurants - so there are people investing money in the area.

The other place is a storefront for lease that we looked at over a year ago, and it's still vacant. It's in a great area near the waterfront with lots of foot traffic, although not much other retail - but there are restaurants and a few shops.

Almost every day I sit down with a book I got from the library called The Boss of You. I have a notepad and a pen nearby to take notes.

We have a pretty clear vision of what we want the store to be like - Mark is planning the pottery studio part where he'll give classes and people can come in to use the equipment. I am planning the gallery part of it - selling all handcrafted items from pottery to jewelry, to woodwork to glass....and maybe even some handspun yarn.

It's fun to dream about it.