Okay, so you knew that title was coming. The last two weeks or so have been a blur (even more so than normal for me.) We have put in so much time packing our inventory, shelving, equipment, and everything else and moving it to our much smaller warehouse and even our house. It hasn’t helped that Eliz has had to it without much use of her left arm (she broke it on 23 Dec when she slipped off the final step of a step stool.) She has managed to do a great job, especially backing our truck into the loading dock.
We wouldn’t have been able to get everything out as quickly as we did without a ton of help from Eliz’s sister Margaret and her husband Chris, along with Frankie, Michael, and Frank. It is hard trying to pack stuff up and move it while also trying to help customers and ship orders placed online. It will take us another week or two to get everything out of boxes and onto shelving units. It is kind of tough right now when get orders. Eliz was able to find all the products for the nine orders we shipped yesterday. We received a couple of orders late today that will be a challenge tomorrow.
It is nice working from home though. It will be nicer once everything is setup. I was able to hook up the credit card machine today so we could deliver a couple of phone orders to local salons. Bring your credit cards over and I’ll show you how it works…
We went to moldy premises today to get the final few things we had there out and to let Peco in to get a final meter reading. While there, waiting for Peco, a customer called my mobile. She has been in many times over the past month or two and wanted to come in to buy a few things before we exited the used salon furniture business. She was surprised that today was it for that even though we told her in the past not to wait too long and had showed her the mold and mushrooms. The customer was there for about five minutes when the woman from Peco showed up. The woman from Peco told me they were going to shut the power off. Not a problem for me. Then she killed the power. I was in the warehouse and realized our truck was still inside. She wasn’t happy about it, but the woman from Peco turned the power back on long enough to get the huge door opened, the truck out, and the door closed. I thanked her and gave her three cases of Disani water that hadn’t sold.
Meanwhile, the customer continued to look at things we had for sale using a flashlight. She ended up buy about $55 worth of stuff, most of which we were going to put in the dumpster. It was simply incredible. I’m sorry we didn’t have more junk there for her to buy.
The customer took so long that we were late picking up an order of perms and developer from one of our buying partners. Being late for that pushed everything else back; orders that should have been shipped out today will go tomorrow (we received the orders today, so it isn’t that bad that they’ll take an extra day,) the local deliveries were made later than we like (though the salons were still open when we got to them between 6:30 and 7:00,) and dinner was not eaten until about 8:00, which is too late for the kids, in my opinion. We did all this running around with our perm and developer order in the back of the car (okay, it’s an SUV — a 2010 Pilot.) We had about 34 boxes of stuff in the car, plus a bin with the phone system in it. Many of the developer and shampoo boxes contained gallons of product (four gallons per box.) After dinner, I enjoyed carrying the boxes inside so they wouldn’t freeze overnight. I figured that would burn enough calories so that I could have a small snack afterwards (I’ve been eating about 1500 calories per day since 10 December and have lost about 15 pounds.)
I’m looking forward to this new year. We’re out of the mold and trying something different (going to customers more, instead of waiting for them to come to us.) The beginning of the year is always hectic but fun. Jane’s birthday is 2 Jan, Jacob’s is 7 Jan, as is my dad’s — he’ll be 92 on Thursday. Once again, I’d like to wish all of you a happy and healthy year.