40 Love Courture: Open for Business!

Posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 at 1:34 pm.

Well folks we finally refurbished our physical location and opened shop in Downtown Monument, Colorado! We aren’t yet announcing a grand opening, because we’ve just been as busy as we can be, but we will soon. However, every third Thursday there is an Art Hop in the Historic Downtown Monument, and we’ll be open for that. But I wanted to post our before and after pictures for your viewing pleasure.  Hope you enjoy the transformation as much as we did!

40 Love Courture

Getting the Space Ready: the Floor

Posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2012 at 9:22 pm.

Last time, I talked about ways to help ease the cost of moving in. This time I’ll talk about the actual grunt work that needed to be done to move in.

Be Prepare to spend a couple of days and then a couple more on actually getting the work done. If you’re lucky and can afford to set aside time to work in your space then you might be able to get in done in only two or three days rather than a week. But, in most cases if this is your first move in to a space apart from your house it will take some time.

So, we pulled up the carpet and found linoleum. YAY! Or not so much; because the carpet was there there were staples running the length of our 650 sq. ft. in rows according to where the carpet padding strips ended.  Not to mention the tack strips running along the perimeter of the room.

To do this in a timely fashion here are the tools you need: a small flat-head screwdriver, needle nose pliers, a crow bar, and a hammer. There are two steps: a) pulling up the tack strips, and b) pulling out the hundreds of staples. After doing this here’s how I would recommend proceeding with the tasks at hand.

Using the crow bar and hammer go around and pull up the tack strips from the outer edge of the room. If you’re patient enough you can get the strips up whole so you have less mess to deal with. For those of you non-handy people you use the flatter end of the crow bar and hammer on the curved in to wedge the flat end under the strip (which look like unlined yard sticks) then you leverage the crowbar to pop the nails up holding the strips in place. Be careful, you don’t want to damage the linoleum. Once all of these have been removed, place them in an area where the trash won’t conflict with the staples. Obviously, if you have a trash can that would be optimal.

Next, you want to pull out the staples. The easiest way to do this is to get one your knees and using the screwdriver pop the staples out of the tile. If only one end comes out (this seems to be the more common case), use the pliers to pull the rest out. It’s really quite simple and efficient. Take one row of staples at a time, and sweep the staples away after each row so you don’t impale any part of yourself on them.

Once you’ve done all this sweep and mop your tiles. Find any loose tiles and re-glue them using vinyl putty (watch out! it’s really sticky). After cleaning and reattaching tiles, you can figure out what you want to do with them. If they are pretty clean and newish you may want to just polish them to keep them from scuffing and scratching. However, in our case the tiles were in good condition, but stained. So we painted them. If you don’t know what paint to use, head to your local Home Depot, Lowe’s or Ace, and ask a paint expert what type of paint you should use. They’ll most likely recommend an outdoor epoxy or oil based polyurethane, but ask to be sure. Then you’re ready to paint!

If you have to paint your walls as well, and you know for certain you want to paint the floor; paint the walls first so you can cover and floor drips without having to worry about covering your floor.

That’s it for now.

40 Love Courture

From Basement to Business: The 1st Move-in.

Posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2012 at 6:43 pm.

I just have to say in preparing for the move, all the painting, and pulling up that dingy, old, dirty, wonderland for bugs carpet (UGH!), that there are things anyone can do to help keep the costs down. For instance, most small businesses make friends with their local UPS, FedEx, USPS stores, and local merchants where you buy your materials from. Let them know you’re moving and they might be able to help. In our case, one of our friendly neighborhood small business associates ended up giving us a 5-gallon white paint container full of high-quality paint because they were made by their corporate office to re-paint the store.

Check with the landlord about what you can do to the inside. In our case, the landlord is more than willing to let us paint over gross, gray wallpaper, to give the inside a fresh, new look. While he didn’t know what was under the carpet, our landlord did let us pull it up and discover, from the looks of it, brand new linoleum tiles. It also helped us become aware of other areas that might need extra attention in the future. Make sure to ask what your landlord wants done with the carpet, before deciding to do anything with it, in our case he wants to keep it and asked that we roll it up for pick up.

Ask your neighbors what they did. At the time we found our new place, there was someone else moving into part of the building. The ideas to paint the walls, and possibly the linoleum, came from her. We were able to see first hand how it turned out, and that helps in making decisions.

Research outside designs. Depending on what kind of small business you are running, and where you’ve decided to lease, you may have options for the outside of the building. If you have a cookie-cutter type format you have to follow then everything is pretty much set. But, if you have some freedoms, make sure you check some options out before deciding. Look at what others have done: the internet is a great place to go to research store fronts, and how people have set them up.

After all this, you can make a plan, set some dates and get the dirty work of moving in set in motion. Just remember you never know where the deals will happen, so just keep your eyes open.

40 Love Courture

We’re moving in!

Posted on Friday, April 20th, 2012 at 11:06 am.

40 Love Courture is proud to announce that we will be moving into a new production and retail location May 1, 2012! This will be our first retail location, and preparation begins this week at our new location! We are very excited here at 40 Love Courture. Later in May or June we will announce our Grand Opening! So, stay tuned for the future announcement!