We finally got on offer on our house that we accepted! So, we were ready to move forward with the HobbyTown Franchise.
The buyers had the house inspected and we had a few items that we needed to have fixed. One problem that I had was the inspector was a complete dork that didn’t know what he was doing. For example, he insisted that we get egress ladders for each of the windows wells, even thought you are only required to have them in bedrooms. Anyway, we sucked it up and got everything “fixed” on the list. We also had a bit of a scare when the buyers realized that there wasn’t a drain in the basement. We told them that it passed inspection when the house was built and that one wasn’t required. Luckily they accepted that!
I gave my two weeks notice at Micron. While working my last two weeks, Stacia headed to Idaho Falls to find us a place to live. We ended up signing a year lease for a duplex and moved in. I setup shop and started working on the business plan so we could get the remaining financing that we needed to start the store. Looking back, I should had started working on the business plan a month or so earlier. I ended up spending the next three weeks working on the business plan with Stacia and I looking for good prospective locations.
After being in the house for a while, we started to notice that the house smelled like mold. It turns out that the builder of the duplex had put straw under the house and then covered it with a heavy plastic. They also covered up one of the vents with insulation, so there wasn’t enough ventilation under the house to keep it dry. Needless to say under the house was one big bunch of moldy straw. After about two weeks we decided we couldn’t handle the moldy smell, freezing because we had all the windows open trying to air the place out and headaches from the mold and asked the landlord if we could get out of the lease. Luckily we didn’t have to fight them over it and they agreed.
The timing was pretty good, because Stacia noticed in the paper a place that was double the square footage and only about $10 more a month! This was particularly nice since we would be able to use the extra space as storage and get rid of the two storage units we had all of our stuff in. There were a couple of disadvantages to the new place. It was built in the early ’80s and didn’t have air conditioning and was heated using cadet heaters. Still, for the price it couldn’t be beat.