It was a cold but sunny day in January when we were sent the address to go look at a horse trailer in Terrebonne, OR. It was a 1980’s Circle J double horse trailer we found on Facebook Market Place; it had rust holes in several places, was covered in splotchy red paint and had a decent amount of horse shit still crusted onto the walls. But to us- it was perfect. We knew instantly that we wanted it- there was no way we were leaving this lady’s driveway without this trailer. It was so surreal standing inside the dirty, old, empty trailer, but visualizing our bar inside. We looked at each other and laughed with excitement, envisioning what we could turn it into. We knew we had to buy it- it was the one. The lady selling it was gracious enough to see our eager faces and accept our lowball offer, even offering to tow it to our house, since we obviously weren’t getting it back to our driveway with Annabelle and Tyler’s Subaru Forester. The whole drive home, which only takes about 9 minutes, we were giggling in shock and awe that we’d really just done that. How crazy were we, to have just bought this old horse trailer?!

photos from the day we bought the trailer

After dropping it off at our house, the lady pulled us in for a big hug and wished us great success. It felt like a blessing and a charge, a good omen for what could be built within those three walls. We immediately started freaking out, taking pictures to commemorate the day, looking at each other in disbelief. We really had a horse trailer in our driveway, and we really were doing this thing.

We dove in, spending many days at coffee shops doing research, applying for all the licenses and filling out all the forms, figuring out what we needed to do to get the business off the ground. We both come from entrepreneurial families, so we asked for guidance from friends and family members and were given so much good advice as we made decisions and moved forward; figuring everything out as we went.

The day after we bought it, we were up, dressed warmly, and headed to Lowes to buy oscillating sanders by ten am. We spent the rest of the day sanding, and ended up spending the rest of the month sanding, scraping, and cleaning the trailer bit by bit. We took the wheel wells off, cut off the two big back doors, and cut off all four of the small metal doors that were full of rusty holes. We got to work angle grinding the inner separation wall out, and got real comfortable real quick grinding and cutting steel.

It was such a big learning curve, but we met every challenge head on- sometimes a little too eagerly. Kayley stood up too fast and smacked her head on one of the metal doors; Annabelle almost shaved her knuckles off with the angle grinder- overall, we scraped and cut ourselves a lot those first few weeks. But by the end of the month, we had done our first (of many) coats of bondo on the cracks and dents, sanded off paint for probably a million hours, cut off all the doors we didn't need, and cut out the inner stalls. It felt so good to have made so much progress in just a few weeks!