The Long and Winding Road to a Building
Once the online shop was up and running, the next big question was where Treeline Quilting would actually live, and whether to rent, buy, or build a quilt shop of my own. I had a picture in my head of what a quilt shop should look like. That picture turned out to be wrong, and I’m so glad it did.
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The shop I thought I needed
Whenever I imagined a quilt shop, I pictured it downtown on a cute main street, or in a shopping plaza where people are already out running errands. So that’s where I started looking.
The rent math
The first option was renting. Even low-end commercial space was running about $1,500 a month. That doesn’t sound outrageous until you break it down.
I did the math in fabric. To cover $1,500 in rent, I’d need to sell about 300 yards of fabric. Not 300 yards in sales, but 300 yards’ worth of profit, every single month, before paying for anything else. Utilities, inventory, insurance, and someday employees would all come after that.
That number stuck with me.
The $400,000 building
Next, I looked at buying. I toured one building in person that was listed at $400,000. The parking was terrible. And turning it into a usable retail space would have taken tens of thousands of dollars in renovations on top of the price.
I walked out of there feeling pretty deflated.
What I noticed on the Shop Hop
Something else had been quietly shifting my thinking. During that first Indiana Shop Hop, I didn’t only help at my friend’s shop. I went shop hopping myself, too. And I noticed that a lot of the shops I loved weren’t downtown or in shopping centers at all.
They were pole buildings, steel buildings, and barn-style shops. Some were out in the country. Some were right next to the owner’s home. These were mom-and-pop shops, “in the middle of nowhere” as people like to say, and they were thriving. Quilters will drive to a good quilt shop.
The land that was hiding in plain sight
Remember the land from my first post, the property we put into Treeline Properties?
About five years ago, my husband and I bought 18 acres on the old Lincoln Highway, about 10 minutes outside of Plymouth. We’d planned to move our construction business out there someday, so it was already zoned commercial. And it was already paid for.
One day my husband said, basically, “Why don’t we just build?”
Honestly, I wasn’t shocked. I’d considered it. But after everything I’d seen on the Shop Hop, it suddenly made a lot of sense. Instead of paying rent to someone else, or paying a premium for a building that didn’t work, we could invest in ourselves.
Not really the middle of nowhere
People sometimes hear “18 acres on Lincoln Highway” and picture somewhere remote. It’s really not. The property sits just off US 30 and only a few miles from US 31, right at the crossroads of two highways in north central Indiana. It’s easy to get to from a lot of directions.
And yes, having 18 acres to “play with” has gotten my imagination going. Retreat center someday, anyone? (I’m only half kidding.)
Deciding to build was the easy part. Actually building a commercial building from scratch was a whole different adventure.
Next time: engineers, stormwater, a septic plan that tested every ounce of my patience, and what it’s like to lay the tubing for your own shop floor.
