[Musings of a Game Store Owner] Building

I know I said that this week I would be talking about mechanics and game design- and the intelligent design series will return next week, I promise. However, since we didn't move to a larger location, we decided to improve the one we had. Yesterday I spent the day making physical improvements to my store. This was an exceptionally long project and any chance at writing I thought I would have went right out the window once we got started. 


Stolen directly from TheDude's blog, here are pictures of what we did yesterday. 

   Where the tables for gaming used to be.

Another section of the same wall...

   One employee/son, trying to figure out what to do next. 

Work comences...

The furring strips are up...

Yay! Visible progress!



Volunteers/Gophers waiting for a section to be finished.

 

While the construction went on, some customers came in to play 40K.

Our board game section

Our revised miniatures section



And roleplaying- where you can SEE it!

A great shot of how things flow from one to the other. 


 


The middle section, admired. 

I was not involved in this project very much at all. My job was outside, in our portable storage unit. I failed entirely at getting pictures, because I was much too busy doing what I do best: 3-D Tetris. I took most of the random 'just thrown in there' crap from our POD (seen here):

and turned the very jankity space into something really pretty damn useful. Here are some "before" pictures of the inside of the POD.

As I said, I totally failed at getting "after" pictures. But it's organized and 3-5 times more stuff is inside the storage unit. So now, instead of looking like this:

Our store looks like this:

Almost all of this work was done by our regular customers, as a donation. Our "Mafia", as we lovingly call them, showed up with tools, and helpful, cheerful attitudes. We fed them pretty early on, but as things progressed, folks got hungry again. One of the wives brought snacks for the folks working (thanks again!) and a crisis was averted.


I have the best job ever. I get to work with my friends every day. I get to build a strong community and deepen relationships every time I walk in the door. It's pretty wonderful, and it's why I love owning a game store. I'll get back to the higher concepts next week, so please join me.