MacGyver It Up.

Earlier today, Jeanne and I took a few moments to walk two doors down from PJP and scope out the old Wren’s Shoe Repair as a possible location for our Thanksgiving pie pickup (since the space that we always rent has been leased out and I’m still marginally salty about it all). And it was just as underwhelming as you might guess a defunct shoe repair storefront that has been empty for two years might be, which is to say…SO, SO, SO UNDERWHELMING.

That said, given our limited options for space to distribute over 1,000 pies in less than three days, we’ve decided to MacGyver that space up and make it work. Directing customers two doors down has to be better than trying to construct a tent in our parking spaces and pray for springlike temperatures in late November, right? Right.

Even though it seems barely possible, it has been just a little over five years since Jeanne and I viewed PJP Buttonwood for the first time. I distinctly remember standing in the space and wondering how in the world we would ever fill it all up. I KNOW, RIGHT? Here’s a throwback to that day…(spoiler alert: also very underwhelming).

(Also, that isn’t our stuff. The unit was being used as storage by the landlord.)

What’s most notable about this photo is that we stood there that day and said “yep, we could do this” without much of a second thought. That is the beauty of early entrepreneurship…you just have no clue what is coming your way and you can’t even stress about what you don’t know yet.

We’ve been putting a lot of thought into if we could manage a larger space for PJP. And in full disclosure, I miss that naivety of us in the fall of 2013. Simply moving forward with blind trust is oddly so much easier than constantly dividing the monthly rent on any number of locations by the average cost of a pie to get to how many pies we would need to sell a month just to pay the rent. (I just reread that and it sounds like every nightmare math problem I couldn’t figure out in 7th grade.)

Likely, we will table the whole notion until after the holidays because we have a lot to accomplish in the next eight weeks or so.

Like bake thousands of pies.

And make an old shoe repair place look hospitable enough to get us through our three busiest sales days of the year.