I really wanted to call this "Adventures in Babysitting", but that would have been a SOPA thing and that's not what we do. We're not in the business of warehousing kids during the day. It's about providing a safe, caring, learning environment. It's actually my wife's business, something for reasons that are slowly becoming clear after 2 1/2 years, that she decided that she wanted to do after her job at WAMU was eliminated in the Chase takeover. My job is maintenance, repair, bookkeeping, furniture building and sometime financier.
A lucky break found her an abandoned daycare center in downtown Everett, an area poorly served by child care facilities (one real estate map claimed 1000 children under 5 in a 5 mi radius). In a previous lifetime it had been a joint venture between the local paper and a local paper-mill. a poor environment and foolish management had closed the center ten years earlier. The environment got improved, the building was subdivided into offices and it operated in that mode for a few years. Eventually the renters moved on and it became a storage building.
She took possesion of the building just after her layoff at WAMU and invested her entire severance, all of her 401(k), a chunk of my severance from a previous employer and my 401(k) and went to work returning the building to a day care. We knocked down a wall or two, built new walls. Tore out some plumbing, installed new plumbing, including toddler sized potties. Ripped up a lot of rotten, dirty old carpet and tried to get a floor surface suitable for tile. Not easy as the building is actually four 11 x 70 modules set side by side. Since we're just a few hundred yards from the shores of the Puget Sound, the tides seem to cause small shifts in the floor surface from day to day.
On past the cheese doodle:
Two months of labor, and most of the money later we were ready to open. Licensing was the final hurdle we managed to get over. In November of 2009, we had our first child enroll. In about six months we were full to capacity, 45 kids. We're remained near capacity ever since. As a regulated business, the state mandates minimum student teacher ratios, so without benefit of millions of dollars or huge tax cuts she's created 9 jobs. Along the way we've learned a few lessons, some painful, others not so bad. I'll share a few of these as time goes by.
Next installment, I'll jump forward a couple of years to opening our second center.