I'm opening a game and comic shop!

While it's based here in Springfield, MO, we're wanting to be a regional destination store, and mini convention hall eventually. We've got over 6000 square feet of space, so it's huge, and 2/3s of it is going to be dedicated (and free!) gaming space.

But here's the part people might actually care about: Renovations. Everybody likes a good progress gallery, right? Well, I used to. Now they make me cry myself to sleep at night, but that's Another Day in Paradise[tm]

Anyway, we have lots of progress photos, including quite a few WHY???? images, where we discovered one or another of the hundreds of little atrocities the previous tenants of this building have done to the place over the 6+ decades of its existence.

I'll post a few of them here, but you can find the rest on our Facebook page

Here's what the place looked like when we got it:

That's the front of the store, what will be our retail space. It'll be about 2,500 sq ft. of geeky goodness. Comics, board games, cards, RPGs, manga, you name it.

This, on the other hand, is a decent chunk of what will be our tournament and open gaming space. Most of that shelving on the left there, and all of it on the right is now gone.

To give you an idea of how deep that space is, here's a shot from the wall to our loading dock. Most of this will also be open gaming space, save for a small section devoted to a back counter so that people playing in tournaments don't have to run all the way back to the front to get something.

But wait! There's more!

I casually left out (because I definitely did it on purpose and not because we don't have a picture of this particular area of the shop pre-reno, I promise) a chunk of store between the retail floor and the gaming space. In there will be our...

Reading Lounge!

Modeled after a Victorian explorer's club lounge, our reading lounge will be an area to relax, chill, and page through that new comic or RPG book you just bought, or maybe test out that new board game that you picked up in a cushier environment than the open gaming space.

"But Nowhere!" you exclaim. "My friendgroup is made up of shy and/or quiet and/or private people and we don't want to try to run our D&D game in the middle of all those bastard Magic players! You've failed to consider my needs and I hate you!!"

Well, my beloved reactionary strawman, you're WRONG AND STUPID. Wallow in your failure as I tell you about our SECRET CHAMBER

You see, gentle plurkers, there was A Surprise waiting for us when we finished touring our new piece of commercial property...

Our agent pulled aside a bookcase to reveal an actual, real-life secret fuckin' door. It wasn't in the pictures, it wasn't mentioned in the ad, it wasn't even included on the space estimate.

And beyond... A shithole.

What? You expected magic? This whole place was a steaming pile when we got it. But that's not what it will be.

No, it will be... OUR PRIVATE GAMING SPACE.

Three rooms, separated from the rest of the store, sound-dampened, and set up for media and streaming, all so you have somewhere cool to game with your friends and still hide away from the dreaded public.

Now, back to the shithole.

That's the entrance, sans bookcase. The ramp needs fixin', since it's half solid concrete (good!) and half plywood (bad!). And you can also see the remnants of one of our WTF moments there, too.

See all those staples stuck into the doorframe? Why would those be there, hmm? BECAUSE THEY LINED THE THRESHOLD WITH CARPET

Nasty, dirty, and ancient Berber carpet. I caught a nasty respiratory infection yanking the grody shit off the walls. Probably a combination of inhaling powdered carpet glue from the 1970s and, I dunno, bubonic plague.

I don't have any pre-reno pictures of the dungeon rooms because there weren't any goddamn working lights in there

But this is a lovely shot of one of the rooms after we tore the (frankly horrifying) carpet out of it. That kinda gives you an idea of how big these rooms are. And if spatial awareness isn't your strongsuit (like mala), let me help: They're Lorge.

Also. See that pipe hanging out up there? Ugly, innit? Well, we thought so, too. Problem is, it's a Necessary Pipe That Keeps The Building From Flooding (except when they don't, see below), and unlike the other one (which betrayed us, see below), this one is too close to the floor to just slap a drop ceiling under and ignore it.

So what shall we do with a cool-ass space with an ugly-ass pipe running through it? Well, theme it around the pipe, of course.

So then what do you do when you need to work with a kinda-downstairs area that you need to fit into a sorta-industrial theme to make a bigass pipe fit into? You make it Fallout themed, of course.

So what you're really looking at is... The Vault.

So if you want some super-cool synergy, you should definitely play a game of the Fallout 2d20 in one of the Vault gaming rooms.

Anyway, back to the reno.

Remember how I said that a Necessary Pipe betrayed us? Well, here's what I meant:

See, that's a drain pipe. It's supposed to take Roof Water, and make it On-The-Ground Water. Instead, on a lovely Saturday morning, it decided to take Roof Water and make it On-The-Floor water.

This is after we cleaned a lot of it up, because there wasn't a lot of time for picture-takin' when the goddamn building was flooding.

But suffice it to say, it destroyed about $600 worth of grout (don't ask about the grout. There was a lot of it, and it was stored under the drain pipe because we misplaced our trust) and damaged some pretty valuable wood, not to mention ruined my Saturday.

Anyway, our landlord was super cool and got the drainpipe temporarily fixed right away and permanently fixed the next day.

Since that dreadful day, a lot of progress has been made.

We don't have a ton of interesting pictures of the current progress, because most of it is employee areas no one cares about, or pictures that are worthless without context. But here's a look at our brand-new walls!

On the other side of that right-hand wall is the lounge, which is currently our employee hangout area and makeshift gaming space, and on the left is our breakroom/utility room.

Okay, so tour over. Now for something I sadly don't have a lot of pictures of, but boy do I have stories

Aka, the WHY chapter.

See, our building is old. Not Historic(tm), just old.

Best guess, it dates to somewhere between the 1940s to the 1960s. We have evidence of occupation back to 1969, but that was a single tenant, and information on the building is... lacking, but there are hints buried in the walls that make us think it could be quite a bit older than that.

But yes, it's old. And as such, it's had decades and decades of people working in it, and all the wear and tear that goes along with that.

And, suffice it to say, a couple of those tenants (looking at you, Cardin's) have been Not Great.

So there's a lot of issues we've discovered that start with "A minimum-wage employee was asked to do something outside of their job description."

And, diligent little fuckers that they were, they Did The Thing.

However, minimum-wage carpet shop employees are not trained to do things like, say, electrical work. But, see, they would like to continue to be employed as carpet shop employees, possibly to earn a position as a not-minimum-wage carpet shop employee, so rather than telling their boss to fuck off and call an electrician, they just did it anyway.

So, for instance, I found such wonders as electrical conduit held up by a piece of electrical wiring wrapped around it and strung over another piece of conduit piping that was then just crammed over the top of two ceiling joists.

To their credit, the conduit was still there, but that was one significant vibration from "hey, boss? the building's on fire".

And fire was had, folks. We found evidence of at least three electrical fires in the ceiling, as well as one HVAC fire (our supply duct has scorch marks!), and there was apparently a literal dumpster fire out back at one point.

So yeah, we redid the electrical.

But not before finding various instances of "sure, that'll hold this conduit line that, if it falls, will completely destroy our drop ceiling and likely deliver the whole kit and kaboodle onto the heads of our all-too-trusting customers. Things like twisted nails, flooring staples, coat hangers, and at least one instance of actual, literal baling twine.

"Surely not baling twine, Nowhere! That's just a clichéd figure of speech!"

WRONG, FUCKERS.

Yeah. Baling twine. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you're me), whatever that particular piece of baling twine was holding up was long gone by the time we took possession, so we'll never know what atrocity happened here.

Oh, and to top off the Ceiling Madness, any time there was an inconvenient hole in something (a ceiling, a wall, a window, a sewer pipe), these previous tenants had a go-to solution:

Fucking. Carpet. Padding.

Every goddamn time. Carpet padding.

That one was duct tape and carpet padding, "connecting" a large, iron sewer exhaust line (or something like that, ask our Chris), to a much smaller copper pipe that wasn't connected to anything at all.

Here's me coping with this latest find:

Had to break out the red circle for this next one:

That's our current tool room, and will be our office. But the (currently) important part (we'll get to the walls in a sec) is circled there. More carpet padding, held up with two ingeniously-deployed flooring samples.

Ceiling tiles are less than 60 cents a square foot, by the way.

This whole carpet padding debacle became such a recurring issue that, when one of our volunteers tore a hole in a wall that my business partner didn't want a hole torn in yet, We Knew What Had To Be Done

This resulted in me getting a really nasty text message at one in the morning, which is precisely the result I had been hoping for.

So let's circle back to the office for a moment, shall we?

Same picture, without the distracting red circle. Let's talk about that wall on the left there.

This is actually a sort-of misleading picture, because it doesn't show the rest of the walls of the office. Rest assured, dear plurker, that all the walls of the office not shown in that picture, along with the one on the left, are all uniformly covered in a lovely, brown, deep shag carpet, circa 1972.

It was horrifying. Ancient, grimy, and about two knuckles deep.

And under it? Pegboard.

Because sure.

Yeah, I ripped that shit off of there day one. As soon as that store was ours, that carpet got deleted. Turns out it was held on with staples and a single, hardworking J-hook.

Anyway, I'm out of good pictures and reminiscing is causing me untold mental trauma, so I'll end the saga there. But first! I must pimp the GoFundMe.

Our GoFundMe has more about what we're planning and how we're going to get there. It also has a lovely (horrible) picture of me and my business partner (and an easter egg for the especially perceptive).

We really do appreciate every dollar that goes into the GFM, and it helps us buy things like display cases and tables and lumber and other stuff to make the store happen. Obviously, the more we get, the better the store will be, and I can promise that every dime we receive goes directly towards making Nowhere's the community hub we've dreamed about.

We're also interested in potential investors and personal loans, as we're trying to avoid dealing with a bank if at all possible, so if you've got some money you'd like to put towards making Nowhere's Store happen, but you'd also like it back eventually, send me a message or shoot us an email at [email protected]

And, please, comment, replurk, et cetera. I want see your thoughts and answer your questions!

the amount of psychic damage we've taken from this building is enormous. also the amount of Red Dust(tm) we've inhaled