Amazing things this week:
- Already eight brave, creative, fabulous people have joined Team Julep! We're holding our breath on three outstanding offerees. (If you're reading this, come on you guys! You've got to come on board!). The team that has accepted so far is the best team of nail industry professionals I've ever come across anywhere in all of my research visits in New York, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, and, of course, Seattle. Each individual has phenomenal technical skills and is someone I look forward to spending time with (and hopefully our guests will too!).
- We've ordered almost all of the files, brushes, glasses, foot bath fizzies, etc. etc. that we need to equip our vernisseurs to be able to do their very best.
- Our fireplace arrived and is installed!
- Our signage should be going up on Friday.
- Our appointment booking and POS software solution is actually proving to be what it promised to be! Jeanne and I are pleasantly surprised.
- Jeanne just found a babysitter, which frees her up to build and document the rest of our operations procedures, set up our software, and walk all of us through these processes.
Less than amazing things this week:
- I just found out today that our sinks, which were supposed to arrive May 3rd, are now backordered until May 31. Of course, I wasn't informed about this change until I called to find out where they were. This is one of the pitfalls of ordering everything online. If we don't have a sink, we can't finish the plumbing work, we can't get our permit. You get the picture. So Tom and I took a trip to Home Depot and Lowes to find an off-the-shelf solution. We/he picked one, but I had to go to another Lowes to pick it up. By the time I got there, I started worrying that the one we picked was too shallow, and our vernisseurs may struggle with emptying footbath water in an efficient way. So I bought a deeper one - but it's made of frosted glass. Tom said something about the frosted glass sink in passing, but I can't remember whether he said, "That frosted glass one was nice," or "That frosted glass one was hideous." And it's now occurring to me that the lovely porcelain white one (which is becoming lovelier by the second in my mind) HAS A HOLE in the bottom of it, so it will drain, and the depth is probably fine. ARGHHH. I'm going to have to return the sink first thing tomorrow. I just wan something worthy of Paul's beautiful cabinets.
- Speaking of Paul, he just told me today that the guest chair pieces were cut all wrong by one of their sub-contractors. I don't know much about making furniture, but that doesn't sound good. Not good at all. He and Mike are now engaging in heroic measures to get us our furniture on time.
- My lighting designers are off for yet another trade show (okay, just the second, but in just two months! And in critical times for me!). Although they assure me that I'll have my fixtures by Monday. This is the piece I'm most nervous about, especially since I haven't seen a fixture yet! I hope I'm really wrong on this, in which case I'll be more than happy to sing of my error in faith from the roof tops.- I accidentally put my home address as the delivery address for my dishwasher, and the neighbor who's been painting our house kindly let them in while I was out. But since we didn't cross paths, it wasn't until 2am the night before I was leaving for North Carolina last week that discovered a very large box in my laundry room. A box too large for me to move. Much too large to fit into my Subaru Forrester. Thank goodness for Mitch and Kirk, who found some lovely Wilcox guys to pick it up from my house and move it to where it should have gone.
It's so exciting to have everything so close, but so nerve-wracking to have so many things an unknowable distance up in the air. I'm finding I need to call upon a deeper reserve of faith than I thought I was capable of. That, and a fully charged cell phone.
