More of this Feature • Diary of a Doll Retailer Part I

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In our last action-packed episode, I decided to open a doll shop, found a location and negotiated a lease.  This week, I start to renovate the doll shop space, move in, and battle marching armies of ants. 

June 1, 2001:  The Lease Is Closed!

I've got the key!! I bounce, not walk, over to the rented space and go inside.  All the junk from the prior tenant has been moved out (they were evicted) and the first thing I see is......a VERY dirty carpet.  A hideous carpet.  A carpet that I didn't notice before because the walls were such a hideous shade of pink and all the junk in the space covered up the spots on the carpet.  This presents a dilemma, since all of the doll inventory has to be moved that weekend before the moving van comes to move the fixtures on Tuesday.  

My first thought is:  "I have to replace the carpet!"  A quick visit to Home Depot confirms that I cannot afford to replace the carpet and still have any money left for new inventory.  My NEXT thought is that I'll have to have the carpet cleaned.  BUT....I want to start moving the inventory in two days.  Well, the OLD Denise (the lazy tied-to-her computer web site editor) would have just scurried around to find a carpet cleaning company to clean the carpet tomorrow.  However, the NEW Denise (do-it-yourself adaptable business owner) decided to rent a steam carpet cleaner and do it herself.

I discovered three things in the process of 6 hours worth of carpet cleaning.  First, I discover that steam carpet cleaning is back-breaking work and that steam carpet cleaners are not paid NEARLY enough for the hard work they do.  Second, I discover huge amounts of disgusting grime coming out of the carpet (didn't the Home Mortgage people EVER clean this carpet?)  The final discovery, however, was the best one--once clean, the carpet looked great!!  The colors were nice, and except for a few spots that I could artfully hide with fixtures, the carpet looked nearly new. 

June 2, 2001:  Taking Inventory

I meet Suzy (owner of the doll shop that I am buying the inventory from) very early in the morning so we can go through the inventory together and negotiate a final price.  Inventory goes smoothly and quickly--and a price is agreed to before lunch.  Suzy and I have a celebratory lunch, then go back to the shop to pack up dolls.  Now, this sounds like a perfect and stress-free day, right?  WRONG--most doll boxes are actually devices created to torture the person trying to unbox or RE-box the dolls.  The simple doll boxes have little cardboard pieces that just come out and hold necks and feet in place, but even these can take some time to figure out.  The complicated boxes often have Styrofoam inserts, and the doll has to be placed into the insert JUST SO or the box won't close.  I struggle mightily to box up about 4 or 5 dolls in 1/2 an hour while Suzy boxes up roughly 30 in the same amount of time.  Suzy assures me that I'll get used to the boxes once I've been running the shop for awhile, but I'm trying to figure out if I can start a new trend and send the dolls home with their new owners in attractive gift bags instead.

June 4, 2001:  Moving Dolls

Its moving day!  The dolls are all packed up and ready to move to their new home.  I get into my husband's cavernous truck and drive the 40 minutes to Suzy's shop.  As an aside, this is a hilarious sight.  I am a rather small (5-foot tall) woman, and my husband has a huge Ford F150 truck with a camper shell on the back.  I look a bit like my daughter trying to drive daddy's truck when I drive it (you know the look--big truck rolls by and you can barely see the hair on the head of the woman in the window).  In fact, when my husband first wanted to BUY the truck, we were living in Los Angeles on a tiny street in the hills, with a very small garage, and I thought he'd lost his mind.  I argued that there was no place to park the truck, that trucks got terrible gas mileage, and what would he DO with a truck in Los Angeles?  He argued that I needed a truck to go to doll shows and flea markets and auctions...lets just say he definitely knew the way to my heart, we've had the truck for 4 years now and I DO use it quite a bit for doll-related events!

Back to the move...I get to Suzy's with the truck, and we fill the truck up, and I drive to my new store to unload.  Then we do it again.  And again.  By the third time I've gotten smart and realized that the most time-consuming part of loading up the dolls was getting in and out of the back of the truck to move doll boxes to the back, so I take my 8-year old son with me and put HIM in the back of the truck while we hand doll boxes up to him.  Son was co-operative because he was bribed with a particular black stuffed bear he'd been admiring at Suzy's.  As a parent, I can see some advantages to owning a doll/toy shop that are just becoming evident.

June 6:  Moving Fixtures and Setting Up The Store Room

The movers show up to move all the fixtures, furniture, storeroom shelves and other items too big for Suzy and I to handle.  Pimple-faced teenagers show up at the door with the moving van, and I silently panic.  Pimple-faced teenagers prove to be proficient movers and all is well--not one item was broken in transit.  So, there I am!!  I have the shop premises, the inventory, and all my fixtures...in a huge mess all thrown into the center of the shop.   I carefully consider my next move.  Well, in order to paint the shop (my next big task) I need to get the dolls in boxes into the storeroom.  In order to get the dolls into the storeroom, I have to get the storage shelves into the storeroom.  There is one huge obstacle...a strange built-into the wall 2-inch thick wood utility shelf which takes up most of the storeroom.  I assume that this was used to hang up coats of Home Mortgage employees, since there are hooks on it. The shelf is huge and in the way, since I can't move MY shelving units in until its gone.  Unfortunately, when I decided to open the shop, my husband warned "you'll have to do it all on your own" since he was planning a very busy summer with a new job.  SO, do-it-yourself Denise decided that she could tackle the shelf on her own.  Since after delivering the "you'll have to do it on your own" speech my husband bought me a tool kit for the shop, I open the kit up and find a screwdriver.  First, I unscrew GIANT screws holding the shelf in place (shelf does not collapse thanks to a giant leg holding up one end).  The screws are, no exaggeration, 5 inches long.  OK, I'm ALL done, except for this ONE screw.  It's been hammered into a recess in the shelf, and I cannot get my screwdriver in to unscrew it!!  This is upsetting--so close, yet so far!!  I do the only thing I can think of--I start to swing the shelving back and forth hoping to break the wood around where the imbedded screw is.  Creak, groan, creak groan---the wood is splintering like crazy and making hellacious noises.  FINALLY, it breaks off the wall, and throws me half way across the room.  I'm uninjured!!  The shelf is gone!! Hurray!  I go into the washroom to wash up and there's no time to celebrate because I find....

Ants!

Ants! Ants everywhere, obviously very impressed by the soda my son left in the trash can 2 days ago.  I kill all the ants with Windex (did you know that Windex kills ants?  Now you do.)  and trash the soda in the outside dumpster.  After this incident, I am very careful to not leave any food or drink around in the shop (I'm very anti-pesticide and don't want to use bug killer since my kids will be in the shop with me all summer as I renovate).  For a few days, no ants.  Then, I'm calmly stacking boxes in the store room one day and an ant runs over my bare foot.  I look down, and find a trail.  Ugh.  I follow the trail and I find....in the shop office my daughter dropped ONE drop of ketchup on my carpet the night before. There is a veritable feeding frenzy on the drop of ketchup with a little hill of ants.  I cannot BELIEVE this--for Pete's sake, right next DOOR is a restaurant where they have JUGS of ketchup lying around.  And LOTS of food for ants.  I get a drop of ketchup in my shop, and the ants have a party.  I rapidly figure out that the restaurant must be spraying their ants, so the ants need to feed on my meager offerings.  After two more similar invasions, I decide chemical warfare is the only solution, and keep the children out of the shop for a few days.  Ants are gone (I mean, the LAST thing I needed were customers saying "Oh, look at this cute doll" and then FLEEING out of my store after seeing a line of marching ants NEXT to the doll.  There's nothing cute about ants!).

Mid-June

By mid-June, I have the storeroom and inventory under control, and the basic layout of my store figured out (modern dolls and bears in the main L-shaped part, children's dolls and toys in one room and vintage and antique dolls and vintage ephemera/buttons/ribbons in the last room).  Its now time to get rid of the putrid pink and paint the walls!   

Look for the next installment of "Diary of A Doll Retailer" --with entries on "The San Francisco Gift Center", "Bills, Bills, Bills", and "Why I'll Never Take Up Room Painting As A Profession"! 

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