4 Girls' Garage

That was one of the hardest t I t At least. It was awful. And we would try out names and our kids would say, oh, mommy can't do that. We didn't know. And there was a lot of trials and errors. And then we finally came down to the fact that we have a garage store in the front and a garage store in the back. And one of the husbands said, four girls in the garage. Simple as that. No. I can put gas in mine. I can put gas. I can wash it. I learned how to open the hood. Well, we started out with a lot of our kids wanting to furnish their apartments, their dorm rooms, new houses. And it's very expensive to get decent furniture. And were seeing so many nice pieces, well-made furniture pieces that just needed a little TLC. So, it ended a little bit of art touch to it. Just fun colors with chalk paint. And so, we started out that way and we had a lot of fun finding pieces that were discarded, not usable that we could fix up and do and be loved again. And I t Our lights. Our c We have a gentleman here locally in Topeka that makes those for us. So, we try to keep a line of those in here, the single ones, double. And he's making us a triple one for our counter that we don't have yet. So, those are always fun items. I love to look at an item and that's the really fun part of the business. Yes, it's the hunt. For the great items that we want. We need to have sales in our storages where we have all of those items. But we go actually all over several states away and do a lot of the big flea markets. And we do estate sales. And we've been around long enough now that we have quite a few people that call us and say, I bet you could do some magic with t We have pickers that we've networked with over the years now that they travel to Texas and up into the southern states. And they'll take some of our pieces and trade or they'll look for certain items that we're looking for. So, that's been real fun to meet those folks too. Our p I always tell the people that come in. You need to go through twice. You need to look up and then you come back and you've got to look low because it'sort of Whoever's not working t It's always fun for us to see what's new. We've been friends for a very long time and I t We all have other careers that we've done and were working when we first started the store as well but I t And we got our feet wet. We started at the monthly market two days and we just decided we So j So we j We had an 1800s building and so we had no plans on leaving. We love what we're doing. We love what's happening in the district in downtown Topeka and we're excited. We're having fun. We get lots of comments on our rock wall that we took the plaster down on and I wish that we had kept pictures of the three of us with our sledgehammers and crowbars taking that down but it was a lot of fun. It was really messy. The first day was fun, the t We have our original tin ceiling. One of the few buildings down here that's in excellent condition. We also have the horsehair tufts in the grouting in our rock wall. It's the original. It's how they built their rock walls and fell to the grout here. And so it's an old Odd Fellows building. The t It's an exciting t We have a lot of customers come in that grew up in the area or that their families own businesses in t In fact, it used to be a Crohnet donut shop.