Homeward Bound

I blogged about our plans to move back to the DFW area and I said that I would keep everyone updated on our progress. Bonham is still applying for jobs. More and more are coming open as we head towards the end of the school year.... We are just hoping and praying that he gets on with a good district. I am trying not to worry too much, because almost every district has said that it will be July or August before they hire alternative certification teachers. It’s just so hard to wait!!!

We are going to be renting a house that my parents own in the Azle/Weatherford area. It has lots of room for the kids (and Jersey - our dog) to run and play. Jayna has already started planning what we are going to grow in our garden. =)

I'm not sure if I blogged about the possibility of running a wedding venue in Azle, but it doesn't look promising.... it sounded good at first. I'm normally pretty optimistic, but I had some doubts with this business venture. I could see both sides: how it could work and how it could fail. Which I guess is good anytime you consider a business. The biggest problem that we had was the fact that this guy wanted this to be 'our' business. We tried to explain to him that we have a business, the DJ business. If we wanted to start up something bigger and take more risk, we would... but we would do it in our own time. Anyway, each time we talked to man, his numbers changed. He was a really nice guy, but he had unrealistic expectations of what could be made doing this. At first, he wanted to split up the building rental fee and he was hoping to make about $3,400 a month. Then he went to $3,500-$4,500 a month. But each time he talked about it, he only wanted 1/2 of the building rental fee. He really thought that it could bring in $9,000 a month consistently!?! He was going to let us have the other 1/2 of the building rental fee, plus anything else that we could make off it as far as DJing, consulting, cakes, etc. But he wanted us to cover the utilities and upkeep of supplies, linens, etc. He said, 'Well, the way I look at it is that I am providing the building'. Well that's great Mister! But I wasn't the one with the idea to start a new business, you were! So if you want to be a business man, then you need to have some money to put into it. There are a lot of other details and back-and-forth conversation that have gone on, but I feel like I am rambling and I'm all over the place.... the last conversation with him was earlier this week and he proposed this: $1,250 a month 'rent' (from us) plus 1/2 of the first 2 building rentals of the month, we cover the utilities and we can keep the rest of whatever the business makes. Um, let me think..... No, thanks! Bonham told him, 'When we move, we will be living on 1 income plus the DJ business. We are not in a position to take a risk like that. If we had one month that we didn't have anything booked at this venue, we wouldn't be able to pay him rent or the cover the electric bill.' And not to mention, WE DON'T WANT THE RISK!!! I know that I have said that in this post several times... and most of you probably get it, but we had to keep telling him. So I'm not sure f he understood what we were trying to tell him or not. =) The call ended with him saying, 'Well, I have a lot to mull over. I'll talk to you later....' He hasn't called back and we aren't really expecting him to. Bonham said that he basically told the guy 'how it was'. The funny thing is that we've tried to tell him every time we've talked to him. We've told him that it would be 12-18 months before he really started to see a steady stream of bookings, that he would need to put several thousand dollars into the business into it before anyone would want to rent it, the Quinceaneras are not as popular as he thinks they are, that schools won't rent it out because they have gyms and cafeterias, that we don't need sound-proof walls, and it goes on and on.... like I said, he had unrealistic expectations.

Okay, so enough about that.... what else is going on? Well, we have been SUPER busy with our DJ business, which is good. We are saving up some money for our move. You may have noticed the countdown at the top of the page.... We are moving the last weekend of July. Some days it seems forever away... and then other days, it seems like it’s right around the corner! Did I mention that we are excited???

So, to show you an example of SUPER busy, here are the dates that we have had booked recently...
April 17th
April 24th
May 1st
May 8th
May 15th
May 16th
May 22nd
May 28th
June 1st
June 5th
June 19th
June 26th
July 3rd
July 24th
August 7th

That's 15 gigs over a 17-week period! Insane!!!!
We had someone call about August 6th, but we are waiting to hear back from them. Surprisingly, we don't have anything booked the Saturday, Sunday or Monday of Memorial Day weekend. We have the Friday before and the Tuesday after... We are hoping to book something though. Also, we have June 12th open, but we are planning Barrett's b-day party that day. We could move it to Sunday if we had to. We don't want to book anything the last weekend of July, because of the move.... and then we could still book something on July 17th or any of these Fridays or Sundays coming up. So if you need a DJ.... =) LOL

Okay, this post has gone on long enough. You are probably getting cross-eyed!