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Here's what we started with. The push to get it into a usable state was long and hard. Many hours were used cleaning and clearing out old partition walls and office cubes left by former tennants.
After clearing the space and delivering the wood for construction, we had to paint the whole area, and then spend another day painting the wood to make the new racks. It was slow going.
The design for the racks took a while to perfect. They had to be cost efficient, but able to hold over a ton of stock each. Of course, they also had to take up as little space as possible. The racks are assembled out of four foot sections that are later assembeled into 16 foot structures capable of meeting our needs.
Here's a few views of the shelf structures when they were completed. They took a while to assemble, and had to be attached to the building itself from above in the trusses and on the sides to the walls. All that was needed to allow for the stability of the racks when they are loaded with about a ton of books each.
	When it was done we thought we'd have lots of spare shelf space left. Look a little further down this page, and you'll see that we underestimated how many books we had to store.

Front view of the new warehouse space. This new area of the store holds more stock than our entire store had for the first two years of operation. It's really an entire self supporting store unto itself.
A view down the first row. The shelves are 16 feet long and 7.5 feet tall. Each location is numbered and cataloged in our database. A book in these bags can be pulled in about two minutes from the time that an order is received.
A view of the second row. The gap on the shelf on the left side can be seen. We've already filled that up with books. We spent most of a day hauling books in from climate controlled storage to fill this area. As of now, there is no spare space left.
Here's a better view of one of the racks from the from the far side of the warehouse. All together, we have about 40,000 books on file in this storage room. Using a bin locator system, we can actually find individual books faster than on our regular store shelves.
With 40,000 books in the shipping and warehouse area, and another 75,000+ books in the the regular store sales area, space is at a premium! So, when we took over the additional space for the expansion, we kept about 30% of the new space for the sales floor. This is a view of that area right after the construction for the warehouse was done. We are starting work on this area now.
When we add this new entrance and sales area to our store, we will have doubled our physical size, and tripled our stock volume over the course of the last three years. Thanks to our loyal customers we have prospered. We hope to continue to provide them with an ever expanding selection and more efficient customer service and ordering functions in the coming years.
NEW-Just Added 20 November 2001!. This is an updated view of the previous picture. After all that work, we removed the wall between the two spaces. The new area will be devoted to expanding the sales floor and overall capacity of the shopping area. It looks a lot bigger than we thought it would be. Building enough shelves to fill it will take months.
View from the existing store into the new space. Customers will be able to watch us as we expand the sales floor one shelf at a time in the coming months. In addition to this, we've listed on three more search engines and expanded our own web site direct sales offerings. Our goal is to grow into this space, and then keep on going!

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