Steady progress.

Here we are rounding the last corner in our business plan for Sunworks and the building.  By the end of the year, we’ll have 90 percent of the building renovations done and will have taken out original investment of $2000 which we started the store with and turned it into $2.5 million that it is today.  It took 10 years of work.  I don’t think that I’ve ever written this story and so over the next couple of dozen entries I’m going to recall and record as much of the story as I can remember.

Coming to Red Deer

I moved to Red Deer in 1991 in the summer.  Moving back to you parent’s house at 29 is not something most people would want to do.  I’d been through a really bumpy time in Calgary and had learned a lot about trust, entrepreneurship, hard work, and the kinds of people in the world.  I owned a business which failed but really shouldn’t have.  I was involved on a business level with the wrong people, integrity, honestly, and respect where not characteristics that any of these people had.   In the end, the business was mine, but by then I was starting with a handicap left over from the debris the leaving partners left behind.  Had I been starting by myself, the whole thing would probably have worked. After a couple of robberies, problems with a leaky roof that the landlord refused to fix, I closed. Then, I sold my first house — the one the I have always loved and miss to this day.  It was the original farmhouse, a dairy farm I believe, built in 1914.  It was the only house on the prairies before the mountains when it was built, today it is in the district of Altadore in Calgary, 4301 – 17A Street, Calgary.  If you ever drive by it think of me, send me a picture if you are so inclined.  I loved the age of the house.  I was made of brick and seemed to me to be an answer for everything new that existed in Calgary.  There were building in Calgary that I watched being build as a kid and saw being torn down as a 20 something.  It was such a mistake to sell in hindsight.  Someday I’ll buy it back just for fun and partly to complete the circle that feels left opened.

I paid off as much as I could on everything with the sale of the house and moved back home with nothing but some old furniture.  I immediately went to work in Red Deer thinking that I would be moving back to Calgary. shortly.  By the spring of the next year I was working in men’s wear in Red Deer, and driving back and forth to my parents farm, about 50 minutes each way.  Around April of that year Terry and I had met and were contemplating moving in together.  By summer, I moved in with him in Red Deer.  We’ve been together in this house for 15 years.  Seems like it was just yesterday that I left Calgary.

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