The results of a 2 year project to move

"the Best Damn Liquor Store on the Western Slope"

to it's new home on 24 Rd. and Paterson!

Monty, Eleni and Mark on the right at our ground Breaking November of 2008

 

The Tiffany Dirt as Eleni refers to it... cost us a small fortune but it's the best location for 150 miles in any direction!

 

 

Things went pretty fast after they started

pouring concrete back in May...

Eleni adapted to the construction game fairly easily

especially after Mark our GC gave her the pink hard hat...

The steel guys were fairly incredible

the company that fabricated the building out

of Phoenix sent a crew to erect it!

   

Locals were calling it the inside out building because the interior walls went up on the inside of the frame first... they're made of textured steel sandwiched over 3" of hard foam!

 

It all happened really fast starting at the begriming of May and running through Friday

August 28th when we opened our doors for business... however it seemed

like an eternity to Eleni and I!

 

 

 

For my liberal friends this is the first totally green storm water drain in the state!  Runoff filters it's way down to these pipes via membranes, layers of rock, sand and sand with mulch.  Top it off with native grasses and you have one big filter.  The water collects in the man hole and gets pumped pure as can be into the filthiest river known to man! 

 

 

Two years ago we looked at a calendar and put our finger on a date and said we should close the old store here and reopen there  ...we were close about 24 hours of what we expected.  The store was only down for about 5 days!

 

Moving the cooler was a task in itself.   I spent 4 months planning this phase of the move, interviewed numerous HVAC contractors and agonized over the whole process.  Cold beer is such a big deal in this business that when we shut the cooler down on the 13th of August people kept buying wine and booze but our beer sales went to hell.  This is my 66'W X 10'T X 18'D beer cave in pieces on the floor....god damn scariest thing I have ever done is move this beast!  The sections were so heavy when we first started taking it apart that I decided the team needed help and ran out to find dolly's to roll the sections around and a material lift for when we reassembled it!  Our 4 largest employees worked with the HVAC crew, it was a tough job and I was quite relieved when it was up and running again!

We had an unbelievable number of friends who showed up to help us move the shelving and booze.  It was very humbling to see everyone loading up their trucks and providing the muscle to get this job done expeditiously.  Monty has been our buyer and store manager since we started this and was a real hero when it came to leading our crew tearing down and reconstructing the cooler.    At this point the light at the end of the tunnel was a freight train!

The last Wed. and Thurs. in August we started

to move the merchandise and fill the store!

By friday we had our doors open and friends like John Lowey, who sometimes likes to pour wine at our weekend tasting events showed up! John has had an interesting life.  College then law school after which he went straight into the Marines to run a rifle company in Viet Nam.  Then back to school for an MBA and after a stint in the military industrial complex eventually was tapped to run Llano Estacado is the largest premium winery in Texas which over the years has produced many award winning wines.  After a long stint as President he was offered the position as Executive Director of the Colorado Wine Board which is what brought him to Grand Junction! John has a great palette and his thoughts on what he tastes are quite entertaining as well as informative.  One of my shooting buddies John is a combination of the two adult figures that kept life interesting enough to keep me from straying too far off the straight and narrow my big brother Frank and my Scout Master JL Davis!

To my left Craig Ginter who handled the real estate negotiations and to Eleni's left Lon Carpenter who made the deal happen with the bank and then Mark Smith our General Contractor!  You could say these are the four guys who got Eleni into this!  I guess you could say we are the 4 horseman who got Eleni into this!

Craig and Erin Ginter are a special couple ...They are the principal partners in United Country Realty with Dave Woodward.   ....Beyond being thoroughly professional they are treasured friends who spent many hours helping us move the store. 

 

Tammy Reece and Steve Thompson are brother and sister raised right here in Grand Junction!  They run a business called Project Coordinators and manage construction projects for amateurs like us!   They came in at the last third of our project and steered us through some reef passes that could have proved difficult with out their help! Eleni and I cant tell you how good these two were to work with!

o

Kristen who is a perfect example of the very best of Southern California is a born retailer having worked for Whole Foods prior to moving to Colorado.  We're lucky she was available to work with us and help with the move.  I am on my way to Cheese School next week in San Francisco and Kristen is planning to help open Wild West Steaks, Seafood and Cheese in its magnified form sometime in November!

Rob Buckley is a brave soul!  He told the Peace Corps' overbuilt and overpaid bureaucracy to go to hell and started his own non-profit group which actually rescues individuals in Nepal's"untouchables caste" training them the healing arts and then finding them jobs in resorts around the world!

Lon and Connie are good friends.  Lon is one of the Regional VP's at American national Bank and plays an active role as their face in the community.  He volunteers for every dirty job that comes down the pike with regards to our community and several state organizations.  Over the years he has also managed to summit every 14,000 ft. peak in the state! Three years ago he pulled me aside and said Jerry you really need to take a good look at this piece of property we have next to our new branch on 24 Road.

Jim and Susie Alvillar feed us when we are tired ...that and other things really endear them to us.  Susie wields the pen for the Williams Corporation and as their public face is involved with nearly every charity on the Western Slope.  What's really amazing is how generous they are with their own money!  From the Girl Scouts to the County Fair and everything else between these 2 are very involved citizens!

...the store is still looking a little thin here   ....we have really filled it up since this picture was taken ...in fact I have the best damn rum shop in colorado once again along with just about any category of liquor you can think of!

This is Dana Hobika she and her boyfriend Don adopted us when we first moved to town!  Can't begin to tell you how many meals they have fed us!  Dana's got 2 lovely girls Grace and Clair who we adore...I used to take them out to by holiday cards for mom!

Dale Regal is a very down to earth business man.  If I think I am pushing things to far I will occasionally call him to seek his advice.  He and his wife Debbie love to cook and garden in the summer and we have been the beneficiary of some of their fine meals!  We just love folks who feed us!!! Dale and Debbie like the winter and we just narrowly missed chasing a couple of storms this last winter....bet we hit it this season!

 

Lot of bee in this store!  Besides the swill on this side of the cooler there are over 350 Craft and Imported beers in the store all available as singles as well as in packages.

Monty takes the cake for being a good decision maker in the business.  He's been with us from the get go and is a joy to work with! This guy has an encyclopedia in his head for wine, liquor and beer!  I have more stories to tell the customers about booze but Monty remembers every thing he tastes.  When we taste wine with the various Master Sommeliers who work for distributors in the state they always encourage Monty to continue his path up the Sommeliers ladder.  He is very good at blinding wine and figuring out what it is!  Eleni and I both love working with Monty he is a very special individual!

We sort wine by taste in the store and the customers seem to like it!

...by getting rid of countries of origin customers can surf the shelves within a price range

and find lots of stuff that will appeal to them.

After 4 weeks sales are back up to the peak for the year.  We feel like 80% of the business followed us to the new location and the rest is a combination of new faces and those that only shopped with us when they were in the neighborhood before.  Should see 2-3 years of growth in this neighborhood recession or not ....for anybody who asks ....even though we moved a whole god damn liquor store including 24,000 bottles and we only lost one bottle of beer and one can of energy drink Eleni and I both agree we would never do this again!  It was more difficult than moving out of St. Thomas after Hurricane Hugo.  Keeping up with the kids was a lot of work thankfully we trained for it!

Still happy after 21 years!