Sneak peek: FLOOR!

Lexi and I began laying the floors earlier this week. And after several hours of sitting on the ground, bending and pounding and lifting, my back reminded me that I am no longer a spring chicken. Laying flooring is much harder than standing on a ladder all day! So the floor has remained only partly installed.

I leave tomorrow for a much needed week of respite in Seattle, where I will drop a HUGE bag of yarn with Andrea so that she can get to work knitting samples and swatches for the store.

Reach out and touch

Clever Knits is located at 214 S. Indiana Ave, on the corner of E. Broadway and S. Indiana Ave in the heart of the ORIGINAL Vista Village.

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DIRECTIONS

From the Coast, take Interstate 5 to Highway 78 East.
Exit Vista Village Drive and turn Left.

If you're coming from Interstate 15, you'll be taking Highway 78 West.
Exit Vista Village Drive and turn Right.

From there, the directions are the same:

Turn Right on S. Santa Fe Ave.
Take an IMMEDIATE Left on Main Street.
Turn Right on S. Indiana Ave.
We are located at 214 S. Indiana Ave, on the corner of E. Broadway and S. Indiana Ave, between a yoga studio and a hair salon.

You can also find us all over the internet:

Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/cleverknits/subscribe
Twitter: http://twitter.com/cleverknits
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/CleverKnits
Ravelry: http://www.ravelry.com/groups/cleverknits

Of course, most news will be posted here, so check back often, or subscribe to our RSS feed.

Renovations, part 2: COLOR

Day 2 of our renovations was impressive and AMAZING. A little color on the walls makes such a phenomenally huge difference.



The big white rectangle is where the yarn shelving will go. A GIANT WALL OF YARN.

And our accent wall -- the color is, appropriately, called 'Carrot Stick':



Holly and Jeremy were truly superstars -- the Fastest Painters in the West. They were at the store for only 3 or 4 hours, and by the time they left the painting was COMPLETELY done.



I think this is one of my favourite pictures taken -- Lexi's smiling face in the mirror really captures the delight that we all are feeling, the excitement surrounding this project.



And a requisite picture of me and 'the help' (such tremendous help!) looking exhausted after all that hard work:



Sarah and Todd arrived just in time for the least fun portion of the day -- cleaning up.



But, an impressive day. The store is already bright and cheerful, and has started eliciting excited 'ooh's and 'aah's from passers-by.

Renovations, part 1

Memorial Day Weekend was spent painting the store.

Friday we spent a good four hours in Lowe's getting supplies, stopped at the Benjamin Moore store for paints, and dropped our arsenal at the store, where we discovered that the carpeting was glued with a very thick layer of nasty glue to the concrete beneath it. This was particularly bad news, since my plan was to simply remove the carpet and have lovely industrial cement flooring. Stripping the glue would be disastrous, and would certainly involve getting very, very high off noxious chemical strippers (wouldn't THAT be a good band name? Noxious Chemical Strippers!), so I had to come up with a Plan B for the floors. I am not a big fan of Plan B.

Saturday morning bright-and-early, Mama and I loaded up the truck and went down to the store to get started. Sadly, I didn't manage to get a true 'Before' picture, but you can get an idea of what the space looked like from this shot:



See that magenta-fuchsia wall? That was less than awesome to cover, but Killz is magical stuff so it only took two coats to COMPLETELY cover it up. The 'bricks' at the back are wallpaper. We feared that we would have to strip it, and mom discovered that the previous tenants had used an extra adhesive to make the stuff REALLY stick to the walls. The good news is, that made it stick so well that we could paint right over it!

The previous baseboards tore off big chunks of the wall, so we had to putty over them.



But we did it! Rome was not built in a day, but we did manage to finish all the priming in just one day, no small thanks to help from my family and pseudo-family: Mama, Lexi, Travis, Will, and Louis.

It all starts coming together

Yesterday I got my business license, picked out logos, and signed the lease on the space for my soon-to-be-opening store. The proverbial ball is rolling with ever-increasing velocity.

This weekend I'm having a work party at the space. We will be stripping wallpaper, priming and painting the whole space, tearing out the carpet, sealing the cement (I plan to go industrial/natural with the style -- cement floors with jute area rugs), painting and installing baseboards, etc. I'm hoping to get it all ready this weekend, so next week I can start ordering furnishings.

So, Internets, let me know if you're interested in helping out, and I can send you all the juicy details. I'm thinking 10am-7pm both days, ending earlier if we can. I know that a few of my gullible laborers generous friends are also very talented photographers, so there will be plenty of photographic documentation of the process for those of you who are too lazy far away to lend a hand.

I'm really excited about getting this off the ground, and there's no way that I could do it without the assistance of my friends and family. So, thanks to you all for your support, moral as well as physical.

Breaking the Interwebs

Due to the upcoming MAJOR overhauls of this happy little space on the interwebs (in preparation of the opening of my! very! own! yarn! store!), those of you who view Clever Knits in a feed reader may find that everything is very, very broken in the coming weeks. And also possibly very, very lacking of content in general.

I will try to make the transition as smooth as possible, but I know that my track record with these sorts of things involves very much breaking them before I am able to make them shiny and new again.

So, I highly recommend checking back here every week or two to see what crazy new things are going on. Or drop me an email and I'll add you to the list of people I bother electronically.

OR, if, like me, you are too lazy to bother checking an actual website for any reason whatsoever, then perhaps update said reader to read THIS NEW RSS FEED ADDRESS. I feel like I should make those letters blink!

Location

Clever Knits is located at 214 S. Indiana Ave, on the corner of E. Broadway and S. Indiana Ave in the heart of the ORIGINAL Vista Village.

::

DIRECTIONS

From the Coast, take Interstate 5 to Highway 78 East.
Exit Vista Village Drive and turn Left.

If you're coming from Interstate 15, you'll be taking Highway 78 West.
Exit Vista Village Drive and turn Right.

From there, the directions are the same:

Turn Right on S. Santa Fe Ave.
Take an IMMEDIATE Left on Main Street.
Turn Right on S. Indiana Ave.
We are located at 214 S. Indiana Ave, on the corner of E. Broadway and S. Indiana Ave, between a yoga studio and a hair salon.

It's coming...

My dream. It's coming true.

Within the next month or two, I'll be opening my own LYS in my hometown.

Clever Knits
in Vista, CA
(San Diego County)

All of this means that this site will be taking a whole new turn. Much of my personal knitting will be moving back to my personal blog, sanctimony. And Andrea's personal knitting will be moving to a shiny new place, too. And this site will become the home of updates for the store, its activities and goings on.

So, you can expect big changes in the coming weeks. I promise to keep you updated throughout this VERY EXCITING process! It will be a WHOLE DIFFERENT thing from any yarn store I've seen in the greater San Diego area, and this is where you can witness sneak peaks to the process as it progresses.