I swear there’ll come a day when I won’t begin telling a story with: „I haven’t posted anything in a while, whoops…” - for now I assure you I’m working on that to happen.
But for now, the fact is, that I haven’t post anything here in a REALLY long time. That’s why this time I’ll be writing in parts - a brilliant idea of my husband!
Since the beginning of the year a lot has changed for us and for the business and I’ve been wondering where should I begin to tell you what’s been happening with us… I think I’ll have to go further back, to the last year - I hope I’ll manage to make as much sense out of it as possible! Just quickly, before I start - for those of you who don’t follow us on instagram (just yet, I hope!) and didn’t see all the stories I’ve posted back in April and May; the main change was that we moved to a new, better and bigger space. To all of you who have been following the stories, thank you so much for your support during and after that time, all your kind messages and words of encouragement - it meant and still means the world to all of us and all that we went through would have been much harder if it wasn’t for you. So once again - big massive thank you!
So, first things first… we started thinking seriously about moving out of Trzcianka back in November, as we were getting more and more fed up with that poor old place - it started being way to small for our needs, but to be fair, that wasn’t even the biggest issue there. The biggest issue was our neighbours and just overall, the people in that town. The mentality there… oh boy. To sum it up nicely: it was quickly becoming clear that that place wasn’t really working in our favour anymore - quite the opposite..
And in one of my previous stories, (the last one I wrote I think) I mentioned that our landlord there had passed away back in August. Since that happened, everything started going downhill. Well, nearly - we did welcome in our family a new van aka the Smurf at the end of September, so that was definitely a bright (blue) light in the tunnel! Fun fact; after receiving the news of our landlord’s passing, at first we were actually considering buying the whole place from the widow, but due to unresolved family issues (on her side) we quickly understood that was absolutely NOT an option. So, the brainstorming began.
Apart from wanting to change the place, more than ever before we started thinking about getting someone to manage „the polish side” of the business so that we could eventually come back home, to London - and focus on the UK side of things. We needed someone to manage the people, the entire matter of sourcing the parquet, running the warehouse, overlooking the cleaning process etc. We needed someone we could trust.
Just like every revelation in history, it came suddenly. That historical moment happened sometime in mid-October. Maciej came to me and simply said: how about we ask Bogdan if he’d be up for the job? And for once, I said yes without thinking; those of you in relationships know exactly how much that sort of thing means - a lot ;)
One day I’ll write a separate story about Bogdan - for now I’ll just say that he’s played an enormous role in our life, and the story goes back to 2015, when we started being together. To me, that man is our guardian angel. And I think to Maciej he is, too. But like I said, that’s a story for another time! All you need to know for now is that Bogdan is nearly 70 years old and he’s really been through a lot in his life, and I know that’s exactly what made him the man he is today. His last job before he retired a few years ago was running one of the biggest distilleries in Poland; he was responsible for the entire production, the people, the machinery… and before that, he had his own workshop where he was designing and building bespoke machines of all sort, for bigger and smaller clients. As you can probably imagine, that guy really has his head screwed on.
And if you can’t - I’m telling you. He’s one of the most incredible people I know - very bright, very responsible, very loyal, and something that very much matters to me, extremely nice and kind. And for some strange reason he likes us very much ;) Not to mention the fact that on many occasions he showed his immense faith in us, sometimes even bigger than our own… Long story short, we rang him to set up a meeting, soon after we did meet and we introduced our job proposal and ideas to him, and he said yes!
Looking back today, I can honestly say that from that moment on things started heading towards where I’m sitting right now. At the time it wasn’t happening fast enough, but speaking from my experience, it was happening exactly as it should have. Now that we had Bogdan on board, it became easier to think about location we should be aiming for - definitely closer to Poznan, main reason being, making commuting to work as easy as possible for him, but also being closer to the airport so we could make our lives easier when it came to going over to the UK and doing the deliveries!
Something I forgot to mention earlier; during that time, apart from taking care of the parquet business, grieving over the loved ones we’ve just lost, doing the deliveries (the three of us), and trying to maintain at least minimal work-life balance and many, many other matters, we also finally got a green light on a delicate side project we spent previous three years working on, and on which continued existence of wood job very much depended on… yep, that’s also a story for another time.
All this being said, the period between the summer holidays and the end of the year has been one of the most intense and stressful ones in both of our lives - well, mine for sure. And that was only the first part of „the grand plan”… ;)
TBC
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