#renovation hell

First, a little background. I grew up in the gaming community in my hometown, getting my first job in the industry when I was 16, working as a Dungeon Master for a game and comic shop called Dragon’s Lair, which became my home store and the center of both my social and professional life. When Dragon’s Lair closed down in 2010, I bounced from shop to shop for a little while, looking to replace the sense of community that Dragon’s Lair had embodied. Nothing ever quite set right for me. Either the place felt too much like a store, where I felt uncomfortable spending time there without constantly buying stuff, or it didn’t have enough space, or it didn’t cater to the markets I cared about, or I just plain didn’t like the people behind the counter. So eventually, I got enough, and decided that I was gonna start my own store! With blackjack! And hookers! Actually, probably not those last couple things, because the license fees are outrageous. 

So Nowhere’s Store of Forgotten Lore was conceived. It took a few years to get to the point of being able to actually pull the trigger, but the circumstances that came with the pandemic forced our hand, and we started building Nowhere’s Store into something real. 

After a couple months of sitting around a table at a pizza joint and hashing out details, a metric fuckload of paperwork, and a lucky break involving a rock in someone’s shoe, we finally had a place. It’s huge, and the price is fantastic, but... Well, we had our work cut out for us. What we found when we got there was this:

Our building had been a carpet wholesale place since the 1960s, and had seen a lot of use and abuse over the decades. We found all sorts of unpleasantness in our ceiling and our walls... and our floors... and any other available (or unavailable) nook and/or cranny. Some highlights include:

Shoddy construction on carpet shelving that would have held literal tons of product. This particular bit, helpfully labeled by whoever Shawn was, fell. the fuck. off. while someone was working on that shelf.

See this wall? No you don’t, because that’s not a wall, it’s a Wall-Like Object. It is merely the suggestion of a wall, because a real wall wouldn’t be held in place solely by two screws and a single piece of goddamn corner molding.

Alex’s tool chest here was hiding a broken and open window, which solved the where the fuck is all this humidity coming from??? question we had for the first couple months. Why there was a chest-high window in a former-bathroom-turned-closet, the world may never know.

This is our office, which as you can see, was tastefully paneled in 1980s wood paneling and brown shag carpet stapled to pegboard. Because sure. The shag was removed immediately, but the paneling remains...

For those of you unfamiliar with the Holy Trifecta of Jury-Rigging, that is baling twine. Which was the only thing holding up a length of electrical conduit that was suspended from the ceiling. That’s definitely safe and up to code.

Thankfully, most of the above has gone bye-bye, and we were able to start actual construction.

Once the sham-walls were out of the way, this is what the front of the shop looked like. All you see before the beginnings of the new wall is strictly retail space. About 2,500 square feet of space for games, comics, and collectibles. But that’s only about a third of our space.

This is our reading lounge. Until we get the rest of the shop completed, it’ll be our primary gaming space, but the end-goal is a space where people can just come in and hang out, read some comics, or just spend some time with other members of the community. It’ll be themed after a 19th century explorer’s club, and that big brown panel in the back is in the middle of becoming a false window, where we can display landscape scenes to move the lounge from the African savannah to the windswept deserts of Mars, and anywhere else we can imagine.

Speaking of gaming space...

This is Sparta gaming space. Roughly the same amount of space as the front of the shop, this is going to be our tournament space. Enough room to host a full-scale Magic tournament, with a couple board gaming groups or tabletop RPG parties as well, without breaking a sweat. We’re even putting in a back counter so that those participating in a tournament don’t have to schlep all the way to the front counter to buy some chips.

But Nowhere, you ask, I’m self-conscious around crowds, and Magic players are loud. I wouldn’t want to run my D&D campaign in the middle of so many people. I hate your shop and I hate you!

Well, aside from being oddly aggressive, my dear strawman, you’re also... 

Wrong! 

With our social media mala for scale, what you see before you is one of our three private game rooms! Through a secret door (yes, really), is a second section of the store, which will be dedicated entirely to private gaming spaces, all available to our community for free! Not available in Alaska or Hawaii. Void where prohibited.

There’s two concrete walls and an air gap between this section of the shop and the rest of the place, so it’ll be noise-free and, due to the struggles we dealt with trying to run games during lockdown, will be set up for streaming, so that any member of your groups that can’t make it to the shop can remote in via Discord or other apps and participate just like everybody else.

Now, up to this point, everything’s kinda looked like... well, shit. It’s looked like shit. Bare concrete, shockingly unsafe walls, and janky construction throughout. But we’ve been busy these last few months, and now it looks like this:

We’re installing the slatwall right now, so apologies for that being in the way, but look! Walls! Carpet! People! I’m actually in this picture, there in the hat, writing this very post. 

That whole wall there, that runs the length of the retail space, is going to be dedicated to comics. Our manager, Stu, is a fixture in our local gaming and comics community, and has been The Comic Guy for 30+ years. We’re really excited to see what he does with it, as he’s been given free reign to do with it what he pleases. 

Our manga section is my business partner’s baby, and he has great plans for it, starting with the massive X-frame display you can see behind me there.

The back wall will be dedicated to tabletop RPGs on one side, and board games on the other. We plan on carrying things that are hard to find elsewhere, including niche miniatures and tabletop games made by people other than Hasbro. 

Our counter, which will be where the slatwall is now (the counters themselves are in the back right now), will be split between card games and collectibles.

And speaking of niche, hard-to-find products, one of the things I’m most excited about is our local creator display. We have a floor display that’ll be a showcase for local artists, authors, and other creators. We want to show our customers that they don’t need to order things from half a world away to get affordable, handmade crafts, and we want to show our community that we’re willing to put our money (and our floor space) where our mouth is, and regularly stock local creations.

We’re opening in stages, but the front will be ready for stock within the week, and we should be open very soon. However, like I mentioned back at the beginning, we’re running low on funds, and we’re looking to the community for help in the final stretch. Whether you’re local gamers, friends of the staff, or just people who want to see a community-centric place like ours exist in the world, please consider donating to our GoFundMe. We’re also amenable to loans, so if that’s more your speed, feel free to email us at [email protected]