The Ice Cream Cottage Story - Part Five

Part Four here

When we last left off, we had just been told that the building permit was never pulled for the *already worked on building*.  We called my brother who said he had indeed pulled the permit, then realized it was under the address of the restaurant next door (because we share a deed/property with them) and once that was settled, we paid the exorbitant permit fee and we were all set.  No fines, phew!  While finishing touches were happening on the building, there was still lots of work to be done behind the scenes.  Fortunately, behind the scenes is where I shine. 

I needed to finalize a menu and flavor list so that I could design the signs and order them.  The signs would go outside so they had to be waterproof and would be unchangeable, unlike an indoor chalkboard sign, which made the decisions about what items to carry and how to price them very overwhelming.  We were "setting in stone" our offerings before we even opened and had a good handle on what would be popular or what the price points would be.  We drove around to a lot of local shops and took photos of their signs and prices to get ideas.

One thing that became obvious to me was that I wanted really clear, classy signs.  So many shops have messy, disarrayed signs all over the place and it's hard to see all the options clearly.  I wanted one sign with flavors and one sign with the menu and prices.  I learned a lot about design when creating the signs, like how to find a hex number (not a curse/spell) for the navy paint color we used on the trim outside and then match the sign's navy blue to that.  I could look up paint colors and find the pink that looked like raspberry sorbet and then get the hex number for that to use in our lettering.  If I could go back in time, I would have designed the logo with this knowledge gained from making the signs.  I would have picked colors more precisely so that the logo colors and the sign colors would have matched, and I would have used more common fonts in our logo that I could then easily match to our signs and anything we printed.  Lessons learned for the next time!

I also had really envisioned The Cottage with shutters on the windows and was disappointed to realize that we couldn't because of the placement of the support beams holding up the awning.  Bummer! This process was nothing if not humbling. Maybe one day I will figure out some narrow custom shutters to hang.

We needed a big sign that read "The Ice Cream Cottage" for the top of our building, and I reached out to a few companies for quotes but they were so expensive!  The ice cream shack owner casually mentioned to look into the vocational schools to see if they would take on making a sign as a project.  I looked up the head of carpentry at the local vocational school and emailed him asking if his students would be willing to take on this sign as a project.  He was very nice but emailed back saying that it was too late in the school year to add a project, but that they could do it for us in the fall.  I replied telling him that we needed it at the beginning of May and I totally understood his students couldn't do it but could he recommend any sign company to me instead?  I figured all these wood working guys know each other :)  He wrote back asking details about the sign and I sent him a photo of a sign I wanted to emulate with the measurements and colors and wording.  He wrote back saying that it was a simple enough sign that he could do it himself in time.  Wow! Great!  He said he had a piece of wood big enough and we would need us to provide the paint that we wanted.  A few weeks later he said it was done and he could drop it off, and I told him to bring it with the invoice so that I could pay him.  He came by with this beauty...and told us it was free!  We were shocked and so appreciative and of course told him to come back for ice cream anytime.  

All signs hung!

We had the soft serve machine that came with the shop (thankfully!) serviced and it worked great (thankfully again!) and some lucky lads got to taste the first soft serve:

   

I ordered shirts and hats for our employees, met with a payroll company and got loads of paperwork done, ordered inventory and basically thought about the shop all the livelong day.  She really is like our 8th child.  A very needy baby.  

Next up was getting all of the permits and inspections.  Mother's Day was fast approaching on Sunday May 14th and we wanted to open a few days before.

May 8: The fire inspector came by and we passed the inspection but he said we needed to post our building number on the front of the shop within the next 30 days.  Whoops, a detail we didn't think of but no big deal.

May 9: The plumbing inspector came by and said that with our new *required* three bay sink, we would now need a bigger water heater, and with the bigger water heater we would need a different outlet installed.  Ugh!  Phil worked with the developer to quickly get an electrician and plumber in the next day to do the work and went out and bought a water heater.  Somehow it all came together the next day but with a very hefty price tag.  

May 10: Health Inspection - passed with flying colors, thanks to hours spent cleaning and painting and organizing.  Phew!  We had two priest friends come to the shop that night and enthrone The Cottage to the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts.

Then we went outside and took a family photo:

Let's get it together Martins!

That's better!

May 11: The Building Inspector - We had tried to pin this guy down to come back and give us the green light to open, but man was it hard.  We had wanted to open on this day, Thursday May 11, 2023 because it would give us a couple of days to work out the kinks before Mother's Day, which was supposed to be a very busy day according to the other ice cream shops.  The building inspector said he would come by on May 11 but never said a time.  The shop was ready to open, we had all the products ready to go and literally just needed his approval.  Around 3pm he finally came by.  He told us we could open, and then asked me when the big day would be.  

"In one hour!" I replied.  

He said "you're going to open today?  In one hour??"  

I replied "Yup! We've been waiting for your approval and we are ready to go!" 

"Good luck!" he said and I immediately posted the following on social media:

And boy oh boy did this community come out to support us!  Scenes from the first few days:

Phil and I had mistakenly kept thinking that once we were opened for business, things would be much easier.  Yeah, nope, rookie mistake.  Even though opening the shop was a ton of work, keeping it running smoothly (at least to the public eye) requires a lot of work that never ends when you're open every day from 11-9.  One of our first big issues was one of the $8000 dipping cabinets that we bought brand new.  We had purchased two and one was fine, but the ice cream in the other one started getting soft.  

The one against the wall was cursed, maybe the hex was a spell after all.

We tried adjusting the temp to no avail.  We moved all of the ice cream to a chest freezer in the back and called the company who called a repair man who came and worked on it.  The cabinet got back down to temp, we moved all of the ice cream back into it, and then exactly a week later, the same thing happened.  Called the company again, they sent out repair man again, he did same thing and we moved all ice cream back over.  

Phil took this screenshot with our security camera of the freezer being repaired while we were open.

Guys. 

 

This same thing happened for five weeks straight!!  

It would break every Tuesday!  

We were so worried about losing all of the ice cream in there and never ordered as much as we needed because we had to always have room in the back chest freezers in case it would break again.  The company refused to send us a new dipping cabinet until the fifth time when we got the repair guy on the phone with them to describe the temporary fixes he was doing, and told them that it would never be fixed permanently and we needed a new one.  Every time this cabinet would break, we had to scoop ice cream out of a chest freezer in the back room which was really inconvenient for our workers and the waiting customers.  It was a nightmare and I don't think Phil slept more than a few hours a night through that whole ordeal.  A new dipping cabinet was delivered and the old one was taken away and *knock on wood* it's been working great, as one would expect a brand new piece of equipment to do.

But if something's not a current fiasco, are you even truly running a business?  The next issue was the air conditioning in the shop.  It started getting hotter in the shop and we called the landlord (remember we are leasing with the option to buy and had already put so much money into the building to get it up and running).  He sent a repair guy who said there was a leak and it was freezing up and we needed to turn it off to let it thaw out then back on to cool the shop, etc.  He also suggested we buy a window unit to help cool the shop since we have quite a few machines throwing off heat.  A not-so-fun back and forth between Phil and the landlord occurred trying to get the other to assume responsibility for fixing the HVAC system.  A new repair guy was sent out who did some {insert technical repair terminology} stuff to it and cleaned it out and thank goodness, between that and the window unit we bought, it seems to be working fine since.

Our current worries include the dumpster situation (we don't have enough property to put one on but obviously need one), keeping enough inventory in stock, figuring out how many workers to schedule without having ever done this before and not being able to predict the weather, wondering how we can stay open after school/fall sports start when we lose our workers, and teaching the kids that every dollar matters and not to waste product by overserving or ingesting ;)  But these are GOOD and NORMAL problems to have when running a successful ice cream shop, and we are happy to have to figure them out.  It would be much worse to have done all of this work only to have a failure of a shop.  We are beyond thankful for all of the love and support we are getting from our community and love that our "gut-feeling" that this town really needed an ice cream shop in the village was correct.

And that my friends, is the story of The Ice Cream Cottage...for now :)