Our New and Improved Location!

Hello everyone! It has been far too long since I have written anything for you all, but in my defense we have been very VERY busy! So let me quickly fill you in on everything we have been up to during the past year.

First of all, we got our own little shop dog. This is Grumble, our little Shorkie (Shih Tzu, Yorkie mix). We got him when he was only 8 weeks old and he loves being our full time greeter.

 Shortly after adopting Grumble we decided we needed to move to a bigger location. Not only for his sake, but also because we were pretty cramped in our first store. We decided that when we moved we needed to become a little more family friendly and have a very inviting atmosphere. Basically, we wanted to create a place were every man, woman and child would feel comfortable and welcome. That is when we knew we needed to close Fire For Effect Games and lose the military name.  Here we are packing up the old store. It is surprising how much stuff you can fit in 900 square feet. Good thing we had some help.

In the meantime, before we actually moved we had been working hard to, first, find a location and get it ready. We spent several months searching and finally found our perfect location. This beauty is about 4,400 square feet and obviously much, much larger than the old store.  

The carpet was in very bad shape and definitely needed to be replaced, so we set off ripping out all the old carpeting which of course was stuck on using super strength glue from the 70's. Meaning, it was going to take a lot more than just muscle power to get rid of it. We called in some friends who brought lots of glue remover and set to work. 

You can see we had our work cut out for us. Teddy and our friends worked for weeks on this project and discovered that underneath all that nasty old glue was actually a beautiful tile floor that, as far as we can tell, is original to the building. After learning that, there was no way we could re-carpet the floors so we did our best to save all the tiling. You will see in some later pictures that there are some places that were filled in after tiles were damaged, but we think they add character, and we have a plan for "prettying them up" in the future. But first, we needed to just be able to move in. So, back to work!!

 

Things got a little messy as the projects piled up....We had all our tables custom built and then poured epoxy tabletops over different designs for a unique and stylish finish. I think this was Teddy's favorite project because he absolutely despised those white folding banquet tables we had been using for 2 years. 

While those were in progress we also built a platform where our point of sale and workspaces would be centered. The idea was to bring a little height to our display cases by getting them off the floor, and also to provide an area to run the electricity without destroying the tile floor we had just worked so hard to save. 

Here we have 30 pounds of dice we used for two of our eight foot tabletops. They turned out to be my favorite tables out of the 7 we have made so far, but boy were they a giant pain in the butt! They were by far the hardest tables to create, for many reasons I will bore you with another time...

This building used to be a Post office and a Pharmacy, then the post office was relocated and the pharmacy had the entire space. Remember the open spaces that were once on this back wall? Those were the pharmacy counter windows. We needed more wall space so those got filled in and we hung slatwall for our retail products. 

 All our projects started coming together, the walls were painted, the table bases were coming along, our display cases were ordered and in a matter of just a few days they were built and put in place.

Even Grumble helped!

It took months, but finally we were ready to move in! We put up shelves and once again called on our wonderful friends to help us.

 

We of course had to take a few breaks to play games! 

 One of the most important things we added in our new location was a Children's section. One of our main goals was to become more family friendly. Here it looks very bare, but I was proud to finally be able to start setting it up. The whole family got involved and helped set up our train table.

We had our grand opening of Adventure Games & Hobby in September of 2014. Since then we have kept improving and building upon the ideas that started us in this direction. We have many projects planned out for the next few years, and I will try to keep you better informed as they come along. But here is what we have done so far: 

Custom tabletops at bar height for comfort during long tournaments. 

Hobby tables with added lighting for painting or building models.

Children's section fully stocked with UglyDolls, Melissa & Doug, and Gund toys. 

Custom built miniatures tables with lots of new terrain being added all the time. 

Point of Sale area with a large selection of card games and accessories. This is also our snack area, which is much more full now than the few items shown here. 

 Lots of glass cases to show off our constantly growing Magic singles selection which are all cataloged in an electronic database for convenient browsing. 

And finally our large selection of Board Games, Card Games, Miniatures, Collectables, Role Playing Games and all the nerdy things that we love! 

Oh yeah! I almost forgot, we did all this while also planning our wedding!