Let There Be Light

We received word today that the manufacturer was able to crank out 56 of the 60 low-ceiling light fixtures we ordered and they were shipped to us for arrival at the end of next week. We will just make it under the wire (no pun intended). Who knows when the other four will arrive, but somehow we will manage.

Bathroom hardware was installed today, as well as handles on the doors. The vinyl cove is being installed in all of the various rooms - bath, office, service, etc. Patio pavers are about half way finished.

Pam ordered our Talkswitch phone system - actually she won it on eBay.

Next week the electrical contractor will begin installing the high-ceiling lights which will arrive Monday. Also the CCTV security camera system and sound system should start installation towards the end of next week.





We finally made a decision on the automated paint tinter machines today. We have been looking at two different manufacturers - Fluid Management and CPS Corob. All along we've (really just me) wanted the FM machines, but Corob had better pricing. Every time FM came up with a better deal, Corob threw in something else to bring their package price down. Today we worked a deal with FM to buy the machines that they will have in their booth at the Ace Convention in Vegas in March. By selling us those machines, they are able to bring our total cost in line with what Corob was offering.

Most Ace stores use only one, if any, automated tinters. Dinosaurs! We think it is important to be fully automated to show we are serious about the paint biz. One more major purchase ticked off the list ($20,000!)

We Have Power!

We've been energized! Electrical receptacles work - we plugged in a temporary light to check it out and IF we had light fixtures, we'd be able to turn them on. All of the battery operated emergency lights work, so if we want to, we can shut off the power and all the "bug-eye" lights will come on. We might be installing fixtures and shelving by the light of the bug-eye.

Finish work is happening quick. The utility sink and the drinking fountain were installed today. All of the interior doors were painted and door trim installed. The railings for the ramp and stairs were painted. Follow-up to the fire inspection done earlier in the week, extinguishers and exit lights have been installed.

Bathroom hardware (handrails, toilet paper and paper towel holders, etc.) and door handles should be coming any day now. They started work on the patio paver system and we should see progress there by the end of the week.

The HVAC contractor tested the system today. We don't know what the results were, but there must be some issue as one of the ceiling units has an access panel removed and two of the thermostats have been removed from the wall. Whatever - just so it works when we open.

In the Home Stretch for Construction

We are now in the final week of the construction project schedule. Except for those darn lights that we took forever to pick, we should be very close to finished by the end of this week.

Last week the floor preparation contractor worked all week diamond grinding and polishing the concrete floor. Below are in progress and after pictures. To no fault of the contractor, this is the first part of the final product that we are unhappy with. Turns out the concrete floor has endless amounts of cracks that radiate out from the pillars. They were filled and hidden by a year of construction dust, but became very visible once the floor contractor did their magic. Apparently the concrete contractor that was used for the original construction was subpar. So, now we're hoping that the store fixtures will cover up lots of their poor workmanship.

Today was the day for the main switchgear which was installed in the basement of the building last week to be hooked up to the main power feed from SDGE. This will provide the electricity to our store and was a very large project that required what seemed like endless involvement by SDGE (they have lots of hoops for jumping through). Fortunately our electrical contractor rocks and handled most everything.

This morning all of the power to the building, including the 100 residents, had to be shut off by SDGE to make the connection possible. I'm sure there are a few people unhappy with us today, but it's not really our fault as it is something the landlord should have installed during the original construction. Must have been handled by the concrete contractor.

Lots of other activity today, including return of the plumbing contractor to install the bath fixtures. The paving system for the outdoor Patio Living department arrived and installation will begin tomorrow (see picture below - it's an interesting erector set). HVAC contractor completed their install today, and will return later this week to fire up the system and do the air balancing. Most of the electrical work inside the store is now completed, except for hanging those darn light fixtures. The breaker panels are now installed in our service room. Yesterday the fire inspector came and gave us our final sign-off.

Tomorrow is our final day of the mentor program - it was a very informative program, but took a lot of time away from other priorities each work day. We've got stuff to do - it will be nice to start accomplishing some things again instead of having files, catalogs, emails piling up.

Looks like we will be in good shape for the store fixture installation to begin on Feb 16...if our darn light fixtures ever arrive.

Racing or Hardware? That Is the Question

Depends who you ask. If you ask Harry - it's racing. He left yesterday to go to Daytona for the 24 hour race this weekend. Since the car still has a Las Vegas BikeFest logo on it he can claim it is a business trip. You have to look really hard for it on the end panel of the wing. It's a little like playing "where's Waldo".

In the meantime, if you ask me - it's store operations. Not much going on at the store because they are working on polishing the floor so no one else can work. It's very, very close to completion; if we can open the store without lights. Not much news on that front. Still no idea when our lights will be here.

Our first Ebay purchase for the store arrived today. We saved 50% on our wholesale price from Motorola on 12 "like new" radios and two charger banks. You never know what "like new" is really going to mean but I was pleasantly surprised. Several of them still had the little plastic protector on the screen and most of them look like they've never been used. Maybe they were cheap because they seem to have been put in the washer and shrunk. I put my stapler next to one so you can see the size. It's definitely the perfect radio for munchkin land. I'm going to love using them.

Harry has mentioned the Mentor Program in previous blogs. We are almost finished. It's been a good experience and we've received some great insight. One owner in particular, the Griffin family, has provided us so many copies of procedures and checklists (even gave us a CD of them) that we swear they must be long lost cousins of ours. It's a father and his three daughters running the company which is 3 stores. I asked one of them last week if her last name was really Schwartz. Great stuff but now we'll be busy with checklists, job descriptions and Standard Operating Procedures.

The crazy sagas for this week:

1. Do you have Helvetica Bold Oblique and Helvetica Oblique on your computers? I bet not! I haven't seen Helvetica since I typed on a manual typewriter. Well, that's the approved font from Ace to be used along side of the Ace logo. So we need the font for the word "Downtown". After spending $50 to buy the two fonts and trying to convince my computer that it's not in a time warp and it really should let me use them we discovered that when you use all CAPS in Helvetica Bold Oblique, you lose your W's. Now trust me, I'm all for losing "W", but these W's we need so now we've had to change our logo to lowercase. Luckily we haven't printed anything yet.

2. For almost a month now our electrical contractor has been going in circles with SDG&E, US Postmaster and our landlord trying to confirm our address. We need to apply for our meter and no one could agree on whether we were 655 6th Avenue #1 or 655 6th Avenue #901 or 655 6th Avenue #A. This finally got resolved this week. We are 675 6th Avenue. How do you like that. I wonder if we can re-negotiate our lease for reduced rent since the lease is no longer for the correct space. Luckily we haven't printed anything yet.

3. I spent an hour on the phone yesterday with AT&T to order our phone lines. We got a great number reserved (thanks Blair) early in the morning. Called in the afternoon to reserve the lines and somehow she lost our number during the transaction. I would say "Luckily we haven't printed anything yet" but she put in a request for the number when she put through the order last night and I received confirmation that we got it so all is good there.

4. Started working on our Grand Opening plans this week. Scheduled for May 1-3 so put it in your calendars. More details to come on the planning for this. Ace Corporate staff recommends we hire an Event Planner to handle this for us. Know of anyone?

Phew....I need to get back to ordering product.

Thanks for checking back with us.

Gift Shows Have Booth Bimbos!

Friday we spent the day at the LA Gift Mart looking for vendors for our Housewares and Home Decor / Giftware departments. I think we smelled every possible scent of candle and diffuser oil possible except for maybe rotten fish with hints of roof tar and dog fart. We found some more good sources for fun kitchen and bath stuff as well as a few good manufacturers of picture frames and home decor items. And the highlight of the day was seeing a booth bimbo - imagine that, even Gift Shows have them. I think it is more fun to buy computers, paint equipment and fixtures when you get to spend $40,000 in a snap. With most of the exhibitors at the Mart, we were spending only hundreds of dollars.

Construction progress in our absence: painters finished with all of the walls and the interior doors have been primed; wood supports have been installed on all of the perimeter walls in preparation for the fixture installation; glass has been installed in the patio door; and the concrete floor preparation started.

We ran into a big snag on Friday with the light fixtures that took us for ever to choose. It seems one of the component suppliers for Cooper Lighting is unable to deliver a needed part to manufacture our lights, so they anticipate a delay into mid-March. Well, that doesn't work for us, so now we are back to the drawing board looking for a replacement fixture or some other solution. More on that on Monday.

We're off on a Buying Mission.

Just more of the same to report today. As construction goes...Painting continues - all colored walls are now complete. The picture below shows the blue wall, but is not a great picture so you can't get the real feel for the blue. The electrical contractor has started installing the light fixture junction boxes on the ceiling. It took us so long to decide on light fixtures that the whole project will now be delayed a couple weeks. Go figure. Lights should be delivered the first week of February. The store fixtures and gondolas don't come until February 16, so we should be OK on our overall schedule.

During today's mentor training we learned how to be cashiers. That took 4 1/2 minutes. Then we spent the rest of the time talking about how our employees and customers will try to steal from us and all the systems, procedures and paperwork that has to be put into place to battle that. We also learned how to make window screens today. Of course, we won't be making screens in our store - no space - we'll probably work out a sub deal with the Pt Loma store where they have all the equipment and James to make them.

Tomorrow we head to Los Angeles to spend money. On Thursday we will be at a product fair organized by Benjamin Moore Paint where we intend to spend around $20,000 on automated paint tinters. Then on Friday we go to the LA Gift Mart and Gift Show to shop for fun stuff for our Housewares department.

Painting!

The paint contractor started today - yellow and green walls have appeared. The door and window frame for the patio was also installed. HVAC and electrical contractors -- same old thing, they keep moving along -- more ducts and more conduit.

Race Seeks Treasures

Race did a walk-thru inspection today looking for loose screws, conduit brackets, bits of wire and junction box slugs that he could pocket and add to his treasure box. I made him leave all the sharp pointed drywall screws. He thought it would be fun to be there while work was going on, but of course it was "too loud", just like Daddy's music and racing.

All of the interior doors were installed today as well as the hand railings for the new stairs and ramp. There is dry wall mud dust everywhere from the sanding, so the drywall guys must be getting close to done.

So, here's something we've learned -- Apparently a building is really just a big balloon and when the HVAC system sucks fresh air from outside, runs it thru the chiller and then pumps it into the store, if we don't give the air a way to get out the whole place will pop and shards of concrete, miscellaneous bits of hardware and body parts will be scattered for miles!!! So, they have to cut a big hole in the wall somewhere and install grills for the air to escape. You've got to be kidding me! Here's a picture of our new grill hole next to the old patio door that is now sealed up.

Everything on Schedule

We've been "mentoring" all week so this is our first construction update for the week. Everything is moving along smoothly. Most of the HVAC ducts are now in the ceiling, the electricians have provided power for each HVAC unit, water supply and condensation lines (the pretty copper pipes) are being run and the thermostat cables have been installed. Sometime this week we should have an HVAC inspection from the city.

The electrical contractor is working on conduit runs for the light fixtures. Everyday there are more wires in the main electrical panels. And, we have our first completed receptacle!! (It's the small things that thrill us now that all the big decisions have been made.) Phone and network cables were run this week and Pam is finalizing our TalkSwitch phone system order. She almost bought 4 phones on eBay for something like $10 bucks each, but got outbid by a $1.

Drywall crew continues to tape - hopefully they will be done by the end of the week so that painting can begin next week. The fire sprinkler contractor was there this week to relocate some sprinkler heads. The patio door has been framed in and the stucco crew is now making it look pretty again.

The mentor program has been interesting. We have lots of notes from great meetings with the manager of the new Pt Loma Liberty Station store (part of the 16 store Crown Ace Hardware chain) and the VP Merchandising for Griffin Ace Hardware who have stores in Rancho Bernardo, Del Mar and Santa Ana. They have been very forthcoming with info and offers to help us along during our early days.

Now that Pam is done with the Opening Stock Order, she has had to move on to other ordering responsibilities. This week is our deadline to pre-order merchandise for the Memorial Day Weekend sale, so she had to evaluate the offerings and decide whether we really need to carry the solar lighted military rock assortment or the playful cherubs fountain. (That would be a big NO to both). We are going big for the very cool foldable utility cart - in fact, we've ordered one for each of you.

We continue to aggravate our Project Manager (not intentionally), just seems to be our nature. But, now that the OSO is finished, hopefully he won't have to have so many scotches at the end of the day with our name on them.

Opening Stock Order - Complete!

Finally, the Opening Stock Order is complete. That is until Harry finds something else in his pile that we found at the last Ace Convention that I should have ordered. I know that I made the Ace Project Manager insane with all my involvement, but if I hadn't checked every single one of the 15,000 SKUs we are getting in the opening order we would have had product such as this (which I deleted from our order yesterday):

And this:

Now I realize that some of you may be upset because you were really looking forward to being able to purchase these items at the Downtown Ace Hardware but don't worry, if you really need it "we can order it and have it to you in just a few days".

It was fun but.... I'm glad I don't have to order enough product for an entire store again - that is until we open our 2nd store.

Happy New Year!

For those following Habitrail progress - here are pictures of the big parts coming together and some of it even up in the ceiling. The new stairs in the Service Room and the new ramp to the Patio Living Department are finished. Electrical continues to progress, here's a picture of the boxes for main lighting controls (actually it will all be computerized - this is just for when we want to work late and the computer has shut-off all the lights). We passed screw inspection and the dry wall crew started taping today. They said that it will take 5 days to complete.

On Monday, Pam and I start our Mentor Training program - this is a 12 day program of learning from other store owners. For the next 4 weeks, we will spend Mon, Tue and Wed at Hillcrest, Pt Loma, Rancho Bernardo or Del Mar learning the secrets to success.