Treading water
More chronological catchup, more bureaucratic tasks
Quick recap: In April 2021 (back when we were still living in Toronto), Haritha and I saw this listing for a dreamy property in a tiny town an hour and a half from Halifax. Even though we thought buying this particular building was probably impossible for us, our intense emotional reaction to the possibility made us decide to move to Nova Scotia anyway.
This decision was initially a complete train wreck. But after we picked ourselves up and dusted ourselves off, we were able to pull off the purchase after all — thanks to my unhealthy levels of determination and an overwhelming amount of community care.
(Film photo by Yuliya Tsoy)
As I touched on a bit in that last post, the three and a half months it took us to make this sale happen were beyond gruelling. I would usually describe this sort of situation as an emotional rollercoaster, but we didn’t really let ourselves have many highs along the way.
Resisting getting my hopes up is very unlike me. In fact, my hopes tend to be up kind of all of the time. But we’d come to the province with such wide-eyed optimism, only for everything to fall completely to pieces — to the point where Haritha actually said “This is what I get for believing in dreams”.
My heart broke into a million pieces hearing that, and I didn’t think we could survive that level of disappointment again so soon. So even as we fought our way through funding roadblock after funding roadblock, we weren’t letting ourselves make any concrete plans about what would happen if we actually managed to buy the building. We were scared we’d be even more sad if we let ourselves take tangible steps that ended up being towards nothing.
Predictably in retrospect, this period of suspended disbelief continued for a while even after we owned the building. We were still holding the trauma in our bodies of excitedly moving into a different apartment-above-a-cafe just a few months earlier. We’d fully expected to be there for years, but within the first few days we realized it was so bad that we didn’t even unpack.
So even after we’d been given the keys to this space, we set up the most bare-bones of a life. In fact, for the first six weeks we continued living out of the same three suitcases that we’d loaded into the car in January.
This bewildered inertia must was not what anyone was hoping for, least of all us. Nearly every time we saw anyone from the community — which was most days, since we now live in the building that houses the town’s post office — they would ask us when the store was going to be open.
Their urgency wasn’t unreasonable. By the time we took possession of the former store, it had already been closed for a year and a half. We were told it was the first time in 200 years that the town didn’t have a place to buy basic food staples.
So we did our best to shake off our shell shock, and looked towards literally get back in business. We knew we had some cosmetic changes we wanted to make to the building, but we figured overall it shouldn’t be too complicated to re-open a store that had been some kind of store for more than a century!
To secure financing to buy the building, we’d pulled together five years worth of financial projections for the various revenue streams. They included: my own freelance work, the Canada Post location that came with the building, the cafe and grocery store we planned to re-open in the space downstairs, and running Temperance Tonics out of the space.
We felt good about the viability of everything we wanted to do, but we were totally overwhelmed by trying to figure out where to start. Rightly or wrongly, I think we expected more help navigating this process (from various people and agencies) but we ended up being completely on our own with it.
I know I will forget a lot of things, but these are some of the administrative tasks we’ve managed to successfully work our way through over these first few months. (These are NOT in chronological order, don’t worry. For example: we got insurance first, not last!)
Register our public water supply1
Give a ton of info about the business / building to Canada Post2
Get fingerprinted and pass a security check (also for Canada Post)3
Pass the Food Handler’s Certification test 4
Get an Accessibility Assessment as part of a provincial pilot program5
Apply for the Region of Queens Business Facade Program6
Assemble a 30+ page document to get reimbursed by that program7
Get Canadian Food Inspection Agency permits for Temperance Tonics8
Get building and premises insurance9
Register all the business names that we are going to operate under10
I think for some people, this list would maybe be no big deal. But Haritha and I both have ADHD, and and the amount of paperwork we’d had to pull together to buy the building in the first place had left us pretty depleted.
Also, in addition to the bureaucratic demands required for each of these steps, many of them also required expensive renovations as well — particularly getting the building to meet the new accessibility requirements that had just come into place.
And we were in the less-than-ideal situation of being completely out of money.
This is not how we planned things going! But our closing costs had been $10K more than we were expecting, and a $10K investment that a friend had volunteered to make in the business never materialized. The only way we’d been able to make up for this $20K shortfall was to max out all the available credit we had access to.
Both luckily and unluckily, our access to funds ended not being our immediate concern. We couldn’t start the required accessibility renovations because we had no idea what they actually were. We were getting wildly inconsistent information from the various levels of government. With our finances being so tight, there was no way we were going to start any kind of work until we knew we were building to the correct specifications. So everything just … stopped.
If we’d had more financial wiggle room, we would have used this time to do the painting and reflooring we had been daydreaming about, but this seemed like a frivolous expense while we were trying to figure out if we were going to need to spend $8,000 on motorizing our doors.
Accessibility is really important to both of us. I used to be an ASL interpreter (it was this work that brought me to Nova Scotia in the first place), and Haritha had always had a lot of ideas that hospitality businesses could better meet the needs of neuro-diverse people. We’d always planed to make the business accessible even beyond the requirements of folks who use wheelchairs (which is all the new legislation addresses). We just couldn’t figure out what we actually needed to do to achieve this.
After a lot of shaking the trees to try to find answers, we were lucky enough to get into a pilot program run by the province’s Accessibility Directorate. The province hired an architect to first come assess our building, and provide us with a detailed and concrete to-do list.
We are so thankful for this, and have nothing critical to say about that program! It just was a slow moving process, which I know is about capacity and not anyone’s fault.
That said, if there is one set of dates that I’d want everyone in our town to know it would be this: We found out on September 9 that we were going to need to make renovations in order to open as a restaurant. We did not get the list of changes we were going to have to make until January 24.
Frustrating though it was, this timeline ended up having a bit of a silver lining. By January, the region’s Business Facade Program — which had been tapped out when we first looked into it — now had some funds available (returned from projects that didn’t get done on time).
This program would reimburse us 50% for money we spent upgrading the exterior of the building — which could include reworking the existing deck into a barrier-free ramp.
There were only two downsides here: The first was that we had to pay for the work up front and then submit the receipts and get half of the money back. The second was that the work had to be finished by February 28.
Thanks to one incredibly generous friend who offered us a short-term loan to pay for the work, we ended up with the financial resources to get started. And thanks to another incredibly determined friend (who is also our contractor), the work got done during the worst of this year’s winter.
Looking at this picture I feel cold and stressed out. It’s so wild to me that that just one month later, it actually feels like spring out there. The sky is blue, and all of a sudden everything feels possible.
Which is great, because now we get to gear up for another set of bureaucratic tasks! Luckily, we’re feeling a lot less overwhelmed as we approach this one.
IN THE WORKS:
Get an Qualified Person 1 (Engineer) report on our septic system11
Get an occupancy permit for the space12
Sort out the insurance we will need to actually open13
Drop our water off at the hospital every three months for testing14
Get our Food Shop permit to be a grocery / convenience store15
Get a Catering Kitchen Food Establishment permit 16
Get a full Food Establishment permit that allows us to have seating17
As with our last to-do list, this one has expenses attached to it as well! We need to put in a janitor’s closet, have some electrical work done, put in new floors, et cetera et cetera.
Happily, it’s the time of year when my freelance work also picks up suddenly and quickly. So this list doesn’t make me panic in the same way it did this time last month. Also, the tasks are about to get a lot more fun! Like choosing linoleum colours! Feel free to jump on this post and let me know your favourites.
I’m not putting this newsletter behind a paywall (though the archives will be at some point!), but we still do need to pull a lot of money together to make this whole crazy plan come together. If you’d like to pitch in, you can subscribe at $5 a month!
You can also check out our online store! I recently pulled together some of our most spring-like items to help you celebrate the end of winter and set up a little choose-your-own-adventure shopping experience. As a bonus, the more items you add to the cart, the larger your discount will be!
We have fantastic water! Right out of our dug well! Nature is wild!
After we spent four days collecting all this info they said most didn’t pertain to us.
It turns out I have really hard to read fingerprints. Need any crimes done?
He had this in Ontario, but not yet for Nova Scotia.
This piece took three months!
In addition to making aesthetic changes, this also helped pay for a new ramp.
This was 100% Haritha, and he got so much praise for how thorough he was.
Because they are shipped across Canada rather than just being sold in Nova Scotia.
The fact that it’s a multi-purpose building seems to make it really hard to insure?
Reward info for reading these footnotes: We will be renaming The Port Grocer.
We didn’t know we needed to to this but we’ve booked it for this week!
We didn’t know we needed to do this either, but we are now on it!
Oh my godddd I wish I could just wave a magic wand and have this done??
There must be a better way to do this? I feel guilty about using hospital resources!!
Fun fact: There are five different Food Establishment permits but just one form.
This will let us prepare to-go food here, as well as rent out our kitchen to others!
THE HOLY GRAIL. We are getting there, I promise!!