(Hundred-year-old barnwood from Whitestown – it’ll make sense after July 10.)

I’ve always leaned towards participatory journalism but sometimes you get so deeply embedded in what you’re doing that it’s impossible to document it in real time. As The Wife and I hurtle towards Homespun’s grand opening I’m letting an increasing number of phone calls go to voice mail and on a couple of occasions I’ve even told my mom that I’m too busy to talk. Things aren’t slowing down but I have a few minutes to spare so here’s a quick recap of our progress.

Our contractor, Ryan Page, and our landlord’s contractors have gotten us 95% of the way to white box, which means that the space is a clean, straight, white platform for us to build our store on top of. It’s been an incredible transformation – we’ll post pictures this weekend before we start painting on Sunday. We’ve gathered up a large and still growing pile of fixtures acquired from friends, Joe’s Cycles, Craigslist, Rakks, IKEA, a local concrete supply company and Midland Antique Mall. There are a couple of other pieces we’re eyeing in places like Audrey’s, but we’re almost finished. This weekend we’ll start applying accent colors to certain walls, installing the barnwood planks, modifying some of the fixtures we’ve purchase, and assembling the fixtures that arrived in boxes. By the middle of next week it will start to look like what you’ll see on and after July 10.

In the midst of all of this we’ve dropped off postcards and hung posters promoting the store at approximately 100 locations around Marion Co. Thanks to Emily Vance’s efforts in Fishers-ish Northnobleshamiltontown and Sally Harless‘ help in Bloomington we’ve put information in front of just about everyone we could without buying print/radio/tv ads. Starting next week I’ll be putting door hangers on every home in Irvington proper plus whatever neighborhoods I can cover with what’s left over. We sent press releases about the store’s opening to roughly 60 members of central Indiana’s news media and are almost done planning our grand opening festivities. Amanda already has product in hand from about 35 different makers and we’re expecting an avalanche of handmade goods to come crashing down on our porch in the next two weeks.

I’ll be working double duty this weekend, coordinating coverage of an event for my day job and getting my hands dirty at Homespun. If you’d like to help we’d love to have you. There might even be some beer and pizza in it for you. If you’re interested, drop us a line at info@homespunindy.com.

(Again…it’ll make sense after the 10th.)