The last few months have been a bit of a roller coaster for our online business, Turkey Bottom Haven, and on a few occasions I honestly wondered if this was the end of the line!
Turkey Bottom Haven is what we're calling our hobby business. We are slowly trying to build it up into a business that we can run full-time. But, we are not willing to go into debt to try to hurry the process along. After all, the sole purpose of having an online business is to help us get out of debt!!
As I've mentioned many times before my friend, Emily, was letting us sell items in her shop The Pickin' Shed... which was fabulous! The advantage of a brick and mortar store was huge for us! Lots of people love to touch an item before they purchase it and obviously an online shop cannot provide that benefit. Early in the month we made a difficult decision and removed our remaining items out of The Pickin' Shed. We made this decision based on a lot of different factors, but the biggest was that we wanted to go out on our own.
It was time to establish our own identity.
I was beginning to get lazy and thinking that as long as The Pickin' Shed was doing well that Turkey Bottom Haven would do just fine. That's a great way to kill your business (and possibly your friendship).
We are very grateful to Emily for her friendship and her desire to help us grow. Very few people in this world desire to see others succeed, especially if they're in the same line of work. Emily Smock is a quality gal and we kinda like her! :)
I've wanted my own shop for quite some time now... but I knew that we are in no place to pay rent and utilities and in general be strapped down with overhead costs. But, I am also not comfortable having people come into our house to shop. I love Turkey Bottom Haven, but my first job is protecting my babies and having strangers roam our house is potentially dangerous.
So Hotsauce came up with a plan. He started clearing out one side of our garage and we turned it into a "shop" of sorts. My business will remain an online shop while the garage stores our inventory. But instead of having everything shoved into the space like a storage unit we decided, "Why not make it look like a small shop?"
And so we started filling the garage up and I kept thinking "I'm so glad this stuff is out of my house!"
But, as soon as I thought that, I would think, "You know, I really like that shelf/cabinet/rug/quilt etc., maybe it should go back into the house!"
There are also a few items out there that will eventually need to be pulled out so that we can do some work on them. For instance in the picture below here a bit there's a wonderful pie safe that needs a drawer repaired (and we are fortunate enough to have all the original pieces!)
So we find ourselves in a bit of a transitional time, but we are also finding ourselves in a season of God's blessings.
This past Saturday we went to a building supplies auction and found 8 sets of lockers that we wanted... of course we had to wait several hours before bidding began on them. While we were there a man recognized Hotsauce and started up a conversation with him. When he found out that we were there for the lockers he told us that he had three lockers that we might be interested in. They're pictured above.
He also told us that he had two semi-trailers full of items that we might be interested in and that we could go out the next day and take a look at them.
Holy.Moly. He has a LOT of stuff! Apparently his children don't want to have to deal with it when he's gone and that it would be a help to us both if we went through and got want we could use. All he asked was for a fair price and we could take just about anything we wanted (with the exception of a few family heirlooms).
We only had an hour to go through his semi-trailers, but we made good use of that time and were able to find enough items to fill up one trailer load and the back of our Suburban.
We will be back though as there are many treasures that we had to leave behind on that first trip! And once we're really able to start digging who knows what we will find!
I love this "job". I love that it's helping us become debt free, but even more than that I love that Hotsauce and I are doing it together and both truly enjoy it!
God is so good to us!
By the way, if you ever make it up to our neck of the woods, please stop in and see all our goodies! :)
Turkey Bottom Haven is what we're calling our hobby business. We are slowly trying to build it up into a business that we can run full-time. But, we are not willing to go into debt to try to hurry the process along. After all, the sole purpose of having an online business is to help us get out of debt!!
As I've mentioned many times before my friend, Emily, was letting us sell items in her shop The Pickin' Shed... which was fabulous! The advantage of a brick and mortar store was huge for us! Lots of people love to touch an item before they purchase it and obviously an online shop cannot provide that benefit. Early in the month we made a difficult decision and removed our remaining items out of The Pickin' Shed. We made this decision based on a lot of different factors, but the biggest was that we wanted to go out on our own.
It was time to establish our own identity.
I was beginning to get lazy and thinking that as long as The Pickin' Shed was doing well that Turkey Bottom Haven would do just fine. That's a great way to kill your business (and possibly your friendship).
We are very grateful to Emily for her friendship and her desire to help us grow. Very few people in this world desire to see others succeed, especially if they're in the same line of work. Emily Smock is a quality gal and we kinda like her! :)
I've wanted my own shop for quite some time now... but I knew that we are in no place to pay rent and utilities and in general be strapped down with overhead costs. But, I am also not comfortable having people come into our house to shop. I love Turkey Bottom Haven, but my first job is protecting my babies and having strangers roam our house is potentially dangerous.
So Hotsauce came up with a plan. He started clearing out one side of our garage and we turned it into a "shop" of sorts. My business will remain an online shop while the garage stores our inventory. But instead of having everything shoved into the space like a storage unit we decided, "Why not make it look like a small shop?"
And so we started filling the garage up and I kept thinking "I'm so glad this stuff is out of my house!" But, as soon as I thought that, I would think, "You know, I really like that shelf/cabinet/rug/quilt etc., maybe it should go back into the house!"
There are also a few items out there that will eventually need to be pulled out so that we can do some work on them. For instance in the picture below here a bit there's a wonderful pie safe that needs a drawer repaired (and we are fortunate enough to have all the original pieces!)
So we find ourselves in a bit of a transitional time, but we are also finding ourselves in a season of God's blessings. This past Saturday we went to a building supplies auction and found 8 sets of lockers that we wanted... of course we had to wait several hours before bidding began on them. While we were there a man recognized Hotsauce and started up a conversation with him. When he found out that we were there for the lockers he told us that he had three lockers that we might be interested in. They're pictured above.
He also told us that he had two semi-trailers full of items that we might be interested in and that we could go out the next day and take a look at them.Holy.Moly. He has a LOT of stuff! Apparently his children don't want to have to deal with it when he's gone and that it would be a help to us both if we went through and got want we could use. All he asked was for a fair price and we could take just about anything we wanted (with the exception of a few family heirlooms).
We only had an hour to go through his semi-trailers, but we made good use of that time and were able to find enough items to fill up one trailer load and the back of our Suburban.
We will be back though as there are many treasures that we had to leave behind on that first trip! And once we're really able to start digging who knows what we will find!
I love this "job". I love that it's helping us become debt free, but even more than that I love that Hotsauce and I are doing it together and both truly enjoy it!
God is so good to us!
By the way, if you ever make it up to our neck of the woods, please stop in and see all our goodies! :)
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