We've been a little MIA from all the social networks for the last couple weeks and I think you'll understand why once you see these pics! You might have heard us mention small things here or there, but Akinz is opening a flagship store in Old Town Fort Collins Colorado. Here's some of the construction updates (although they are a week or two late now). The space we nabbed in FoCo was a high end womens store before we moved in, so you might say that the existing finishes were a little too... high end for us.

First thing we decided to do was rip up the existing hardwoods in an effort to get down to the original hardwoods, but layers of linoleum and plywood all glued together and glued to the top of the O.G. flooring made that impossible.


Then we decided to rip out the sheetrock on one wall to expose the brick. Ripping out sheetrock is fun. Chiseling off plaster is freaking hard. We ended up resorting to power tools to finish the job and save our arms.




After we distressed the wall and exposed brick to perfect level of imperfection, we turned to the windows. They had also been covered with the cherry colored laminate wood so of course that had to go. We decided to cover them with pallet wood which was awesome and fun. A little advice we learned along the way though, if you want to take apart pallets, GET A SAWZALL. After 1 pallet with a crowbar and hammer, I was hating pallets with everything I had.



We also built a pallet wall divider to separate the store section from the back with our printing press and dryer.