Shopping!

Toshiba is nice, and gives Ron both Friday and Monday off for Labor day.  This morning I realized that this means he could go down to Specialty Store Services in DesPlaines and get the additional gridwall we've been discussing since ACen. They don't necessarily have the best prices, but we don't have to pay shipping, which would probably be extra-expensive since it would be to a residential address. I didn't sit down and run the numbers exactly last time I was shopping for gridwall, but I'm pretty sure the price differential will wash out with shipping from the cheaper suppliers.

I opened up the bank account to confirm that we could afford to buy gridwall today, blinked a couple times, and told Ron that it would be no problem. As the result of negotiations between the State and the unions, I'd gotten a couple deposits that will cover it.

We went through the on-line catalog, and decided on another four 2' x 6' sections of gridwall, a dozen 1' x 5' sections (1' x 6' doesn't seem to be available), a couple waterfall hooks, some corner shelves, scanner hooks, and acrylic brochure displays. We usually run out of gridwall before we run out of the 2' wide shelves we use, so we didn't order any more.

That brings us up to 12 pieces of 2' x 6' gridwall, for a total of 24 linear feet if we stretched it out (to display belts we use quarter-circle hangrails). With the added 1' wide gridwall, I'm wondering if we can reduce the number of tables we use.

The plan is that the 1' gridwall will stick out from the main 2' gridwall walls, like so:
  ___|___|___|___

Then, the hooks go on the 1' sections, and are long enough that they can hold a belt pouch through both loops. We got "scanner hooks", which have a secondary hook, in the hope that they'll keep the pouches from rotating too much. We'll probably need more hooks than we got today, but we're not sure which type will work best, and hooks are small enough to ship economically.  

The corner shelves are triangular sections of gridwall that hook into the corner formed by two pieces of 2' gridwall. 

The brochure displays are for MuseCon flyers. Because we're like that. Now I need to make some 2014 flyers before Maneki Neko Con.

Unfortunately, we couldn't get all the 1' gridwall we planned on, only three sections. More should be available some time next month. It would be really nice if we could get it by Maneki Neko Con, so we can give everything a good test-run before the bigger events next year (Military History Fest, ACen), but if it doesn't it doesn't. 

This morning was cool enough that I was thinking maybe I could get in and start working on the dining room in the mornings this weekend. I'm feeling the bug to get things made, with an event coming up. Unfortunately, nobody can clean that room for me, at most Ron or Robin can move stuff around as I direct. We'll see if it actually happens or not.

In other shopping news, I just remembered, the 300 yards of cotton twill tape I ordered for tails arrived a couple days ago. Each roll (100 yard roll each of black, off-white, and white) is about 3/4" thick by maybe 9" in diameter. They won't sit on the shelf where I've been keeping the few yards I got from the local fabric store rolled up on an old lace spool, but they won't be a problem to store. I had no idea how big they'd be, and was a little worried.