Two days late on this one, but April 12th was the one year anniversary of the Reclaimed Home brick and mortar shop! Yes, that’s around the same time the Reclaimed Home blog died. What can we say? It’s tough to keep up with blog posts when every free minute spent not shopping and creating is somehow taken up by bookkeeping. Biggest time and money sucker around…keeping up with those damn taxes!

Anyway, let’s look back on the year that was and how this thing will evolve.

Here’s what we’ve learned.

Keep inventory moving. Unique creations sit longer than as-is. All of those wonderful, colorful pieces that pop out on Pinterest? There aren’t all that many people in the world who are both daring enough to display them in their homes and who have the money to pay for the work involved. Inexpensive brown furniture sells better, at least with the local hipster Brooklyn crowd. Being able to price pieces under $250 is key to getting it out the door within days. If something is damaged, we now try to just paint those sections of it instead of the entire piece.

Services are where it’s at. For our first year, we concentrated on making the storefront work while taking on a few custom jobs here and there. Those jobs were gold! We were being hired to do what we’re good at and actually got paid for it! What a concept.

Oh, do we hate shipping. Packaging shipments takes almost as much time as doing those taxes. And all those refunds we had to do online because people couldn’t read that furniture was local pickup only? You can’t imagine how many people assume a small company will ship $150 dresser for free when it’s written in bold caps that there is no shipping. Oh, pul-eeze.

Ok, so moving forward:

A storefront isn’t for us. Original business plan was for a bigger space. More large salvage pieces. More work space. We thought it would be great to have a storefront so people can come in and shop, but it’s actually been a hinderance (by lexi). The lease is up at the end of 2105 and we’ll try to find more of a raw warehouse space.

The new space will hopefully be a mixed use or commercial property that will be purchased, not rented. We’d like to be able to cut out some space for fellow artisans and industry folks. Since affordability is a factor, it may not be in Brooklyn. If Rockaway house doesn’t sell, we may be stuck renting.

A couple of upcoming events that we’re excited about:

May 8-10. We’re taking part in Bklyn Designs! We do believe that they will give us a certain amount of comp tickets, so look out for that!

May 16: We’ll be just one of the Crown Heights venues offering 20% for Brooklyn Immersion participants. This event is sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery and Brooklyn Based. Tickets are $25.