stevelegel

About the billboard...you know, everything has a story. The billboard is folded up and packed in a box. A big heavy box. I have two commercial buildings for the cars. I had bought a third building, quite big really, with the intention of fixing it up (as in you could see the sky through the holes in the roof when I bought it) and combine my hobby into a single building and sell the other two. The bigger building would have had room (ceiling and wall space) to attach the billboard. I figured across the ceiling for example, or across ceiling and down the wall.

So anyway, I spend 2 years fixing up the building and renting out space in it, along the way, for storage. I'm finally at a crossroads to go beyond fixing and finally get heating system, etc etc into the building. One day, I'm cutting the small lawn in front of the building and the business owner from across the street comes over and askes if I'd sell the building. And I launch into this lecture about my "dream" of having a building for my collection and my restoration and storage of my classic cars, etc.etc.etc....yada yada yada. And he says, "How much would it cost to change your dream?" "Like what, you can't find another building to expand your business?" I ask him, and he says , "No." So I get to thinking, and I start looking for buildings. And he's right. Lincoln Park is an inner circle suburb of Detroit, old and built up before WWII. Buildings are small like my dental office, or large 6 to 8 thousand sq ft, or they become industrial. The building I had was 3,800 sq ft. Just under the code requirement for fire suppression, gas main back up systems and such. It had regular and 2 and 3 phase elecrtric in it. The guy had been watching, and I had done all the hard work. As it turned out, I would have to move up to a large, also older, beat up building and start the project over again, but meet the code constraints of the larger buildings. So I got to thinking about upgrading my two smaller buildings, and came up with a price for the bigger building, which I thought was absurd, overpriced and the guy would tell me to shove it and then leave me alone.

So I called him and told him my price. He answered, "when can you be out?"

So, I cancelled two weeks at the office, did a semi major revamp of one building and hired a moving company to transfer my packed up collection and tools, and then combine the car stuff into the other small building. I took the money, bought Ford and GM debt notes and can now buy 2 or 3 Challengers with the combined profit.

More so, the big building situation with my hobby had sort of came to a standstill, and I could not figure out the next step to move the project. By being forced to reconfigure my existing buildings, I then moved, set up my collection and display (where it had just been in a big pile of boxes), and got to work on the cars (which had just been sitting while I worked on the building, raised kids and ran the family business) in a well set up shop, not having tools spread out over three buildings, I had one less building to cut grass and shovel snow, got a refund for property tax and insurance. How cool is that?

But the billboard is folded and packed in a box, a very big and very heavy box.
Steve