For quite some time now, we at the Hust Roost have been dreaming of starting a store. This year, we began with a humble little table by the road. The success of that table, along with the support of local friends and customers, has pushed us to work harder to make a store a reality–sooner rather than later.
Such a store, we reason, would be a nice addition to the hamlet of Glen Aubrey, providing a place for people nearby to grab some vitals (such as milk, bread, etc.) as well as a place for us to continue our (hopefully) expanding farm business. We are still in the beginning stages of planning what exactly we would have, but ideas are forming. I know my father and I (two devoted ice cream lovers) are all for having a couple of basic flavors of ice cream to offer, both as half gallons and to be served in a cone or dish. I imagine such things as coffee, hot chocolate, tea, and soda would be there, and Rachel has hinted at having a little smoothie bar (she makes awesome smoothies!) where she uses frozen fruit from our farm. At this point, the ideas are flying around, and I would like to think that I have conveyed the idea well enough that you, the reader, can kind of picture where we are going and start to get excited about what we are doing.
Due to a recent change of plans and circumstances, we have decided to make the yellow house the store instead of the white house, as we had originally intended. The benefits of this will be its proximity to the road and visibility, the easier time we will have of setting up parking, a more open interior, and perhaps most importantly: the time and money that it will take to turn it into a store will be substantially less than that of the white house.
If you have driven by our place recently, you have probably noticed the red dumpster sitting in front of the yellow house. This is indicative that demolition is very nearly complete! Actually, I gave myself a little break from the demolition to write this post and get a drink (it is very hot today!). The inside has been stripped down to the studs, and we have a blank slate to work with.
We will be very busy outside with a number of other projects for the rest of the summer, but we intend to work on the inside the house once winter comes, with a goal of having the interior be serviceable for next summer! There would still be lots of work to do on the store, and we still have to decide how we want to transform the outside of the building, but it gets me excited to think that we could have a store up and running within months.
When you open the store, I’d like to buy a smoothie 😛