Jenie and Frank dot com slash blog

Happy 2008 everyone! Frank and I are very excited for the coming of this new year, as it has tons in store for us!

We rang in the new year at Alan and Katie’s house, who had invited us over for hot pot! Yum! Frank ate way too much and still smells like garlic. Not fun for me, but he’s a very happy guy. Thanks to the Wangs for having us over!

The store construction is coming along nicely. We have all of the walls up and even have the crown molding installed! It’s beautiful! I’m glad we went with that upgrade! We received our equipment a few weeks ago and Frank and I have been busy doing inventory of it all. We spent a few days last week putting all the shelving together. The next steps are sprinklers, ceiling tiles, painting, and flooring. Again, we’re keeping our fingers crossed that everything continues to move along problem-free!

We haven’t updated much lately with pictures, so here are a few from the past few weeks:

Outside the Dream Dinners Home Office during our training week in early December

Doing inventory of our equipment in a neighboring empty location. There’s tons of stuff and it’s a huge mess!

At the Niners/Bucs game on Dec. 23, 2007. We won!

This is right before the Buc player came charging toward us during practice. I screamed shortly after this was taken. I thought I was going to be taken out!

The Kiya destruction we found after coming home from the game. She went bonkers and tore up 3 wrapped Christmas presents, amongst other things.

Christmas with Kiya…she looks sad because we were holding her down for the picture and she wanted her presents!

Opening her presents…

Finally getting to her new squeaky toy!

At my parents’ house on Christmas Day

With my family

We know 2008 is going to be a great one for us! We wish you and your family a fantastic one as well!

We’re back from our Dream Dinners training in Snohomish, WA. We learned tons, and now have a bigger list of things to do in the next few weeks! We had a great time there and met some awesome people who are also opening Dream Dinners stores. Our training week was anything but ordinary, and we shared tons of laughs along the way! I’m sure our trainer will remember our group forever!

Kiya is also home, settling back in. Unfortunately, Frank had to take her to the vet today because she seemed to have injured herself. When we went to pick her up, we noticed right away that her walk and run didn’t look quite normal for her. The doctor gave her some ant-inflammatory medication, thinking she probably strained a muscle somewhere. We think it might have been all the digging she did in my parents’ yard. Bad Kiya!

Thanks Alyssa for watching her for us, and sorry mom about all the dirt!

I didn’t get a chance to write this past Sunday because we were traveling to Seattle, but it marked the 8 month countdown to our wedding! Again, we can’t believe how quickly the time passes!

We haven’t really done much wedding planning in the last month. Report cards and parent-teacher conferences were in November and store construction started up, so we’ve been busy! I actually tried to book the make-up artist, but she doesn’t take bookings that far in advance! How funny! My mom has returned from Hong Kong, so when we get back to California, I’ll have to visit to see what wedding stuff she was able to take care of there. I’m anxious to see my Chinese wedding dress fabric and my veil! Exciting stuff!

On Monday night, I worked on the scrapbook pages for the Dream Dinners book. Every owner is asked to make the pages, and they keep the books here at the Dream House. When we first arrived, we looked through some of the books (there are lots of them sitting in the living room) and we found some of the California owners that we’ve met in the last few months. It’s fun to get a glimpse of the Dream Dinners family.

We came prepared with pictures of us and Kiya and some pictures from the store. I’m not really a scrapbooker, but I had a lot of fun working on our pages. It took me FOREVER though! One of the other owners walked by and was like “You’re still working on it?!” and I was only on the first page!

The theme was “2008 is going to be Great!”–it references the two big things happening for us in 2008. When I finally finished, I felt kind of sad that I had to leave them here in Washington, so I took pictures to remember my work. Anyway, here are some pics of the pages:

The Owners Page

The Store Page

This would be a really fun hobby to start up, but I think it would take up too much time and money that I don’t really have right now. It would be great to have a scrapbook of all the events related to the wedding though…hmmm…

Yea! We finally got our building permit! After about 6 weeks, I’m proud to say that we are officially permitted to build (construct) our store. We’ve been building out on a temporary permit for the last two weeks, but now…we’re officially underway!

Here are a few pictures of where our build-out process was before we left for training…

Another pile of dirt

Note: If you look carefully, you can see a Baskin Robbins and an In and Out cup in the back.

Ceiling Electricals

Future Bathroom

Alan: If you’re reading this, you can appreciate this picture. The square in the middle of the picture is the site of our future toilet.

On another note…

Today was our second day of training. We spent the day at a corporate-owned store in downtown Mill Creek. We learned the ins and outs of the shipment process and building and breaking down of the stations. The more involved we got, the more we learned and the more we realized what we have ahead of us. Sometimes I wonder what I have gotten us into! Doug, our trainer, was very helpful through it all. He explained every aspect of the process in a thorough and informative manner. All in all, it was a fun day and everyone learned a lot about running our own stores.

We’re braving the weather here in Washington. If you’ve checked the news lately, you know that the Pacific Northwest has been hit with a pretty big storm. Both of our training days have been delayed due to blocked roads and flooding–our trainer had to take the long way around to get to us yesterday, and today, he has to pick us up to take us to our training site because we can’t drive on the roads we were given on the map. During our training yesterday, we kept getting distracted by large objects floating down the Snohomish River. We actually saw a kid’s swing set float by, amongst many downed trees and logs. Oh boy! We picked a great week to visit!

Last night, I worked on some of our Dream Dinners homework–2 scrapbook pages. We were supposed to do it together, but Frank wasn’t really into it (obviously, right?). We were asked to create one page of our family and one page for our store. I must say, for a girl who’s never really scrapbooked before, I really like my pages. I’ll post pics later!

We’ll be heading to a local Dream Dinners store to learn a little more about construction and inventory today. Should be very helpful!

Cross your fingers for us for better weather!

We are currently in Snohomish, Washington, the location of Dream Dinners’ home office. We’ll be here for the week, learning all about the finances, guest relations, marketing, inventory/ordering…the list goes on.

We arrived yesterday, after a very turbulent plane ride due to very bad weather. I spent about the last 20 minutes of the flight with my head between my knees, hoping not to loose my lunch! Wasn’t very fun.

We’re staying at the “Dream House” with 2 other groups of owners. One group is from SoCal and the other is from Wichita, Kansas. It’s been insightful speaking with them thus far. We’ve got a group skit to create for our Thursday night Dream Dinners barbeque (don’t know how we’re going to barbeque in this rainy, cold weather, but oh well). I hate homework! We’ll let you know how it goes.

Gotta get back to training! We’ll check in soon!

P.S. We miss Kiya. A lot. Thanks again to my family for watching her for us. Sorry about her hole-digging. I guess she likes dirt.

As Frank said “Today is a historic day in our lives…” Cheesey (love ya babe!), but so true!

We broke ground today! Our store is officially in the build-out stage! Yeah! We also put up our “Coming Soon” banner! Exciting stuff!

Check out some pictures from the first day of construction.

The front of our store:

The “Coming Soon!” sign that Frank spent 2 hours (yes, 2 hours!) putting up (”Hey, it’s way up there man!” he says):

The messy interior:

And finally, our first pile of dirt (we’re really proud):

We’re hoping that construction is complete in January 2008! Wish us luck for a smooth build-out! 2008 is definitely going to be a very exciting and busy year for us!

Here are the final samples of our new radio commercial. It is these that will be airing on Star 101 (101.3 FM), not the old ones. Actually, these commercials are running now!

Last week, I contacted a few General Contractors in the bay area to see if they would be interested in working on our Tenant Improvement project. I sent out about 6 copies of our Design Intent Drawings to prospective GC’s.

Today, I spent the day pretty much talking and meeting with a few of these prospective General Contractors. Boy, to think things are going to get hectic fast is definitely an understatement. If I thought that getting permits from the County Health Dept. and the City Building Dept. was going to be a strenuous process, I was wrong. I think the buildout process is going to kick my a$$!

We need to cut the concrete slab, install plumbing, fill with concrete, build a wet wall, build a dry wall, install electrical components into existing walls, install ceiling panels and lighting, route the gas/water pipe, get sign permits and install exterior signage, build a sprinkler system, test concrete for ph balance, install flooring, paint the interior, install refrigeration and freezer units… and probably a ton more that I can’t remember right now…

To think just a couple of months ago, I was confident that I could manage the buildout process sans a GC! That would have been a huge mistake. There is just so much involved that someone without the experience or the know-how necessary can’t do! The individual components that make up the entire process must come together like a well-oiled machine. It’s like that commercial on tv where the doctor is telling the patient over the phone how to perform the operation he needed. “Umm… shouldn’t you be doing this!?” - So true!

Here are two samples of our new radio commercial. It will be airing on Star 101 (101.3 FM) in the coming week and run for approx 4 weeks.