Chapter 1

In order to tell the whole story of how the Ravington came to be, we have to rewind—to Los Angeles, 2012. I was a wedding planner, and Eric was an artist making fine furniture and selling it at the Pasadena Flea Market.

He had a small business called Old Wood Door, where people would commission him to build dining room tables and bookshelves out of old doors.

Eric and I do not come from money. Our parents are very working-class people and raised us with very good work ethics, but Eric and I have always been entrepreneurially minded and don’t ever want to sell our time for an hourly wage, so we’ve always tried to figure out a way to work for ourselves. So far, so good! (<---the irony of this statement is not lost on me right now. We may be facing losing everything, but not our humor!)

We had the capacity in Los Angeles to have a little bit of money based on a job severance that I got, and we were able to use it as a down payment on the “Mad Hatteras House.” (the house was on Hatteras, near Vineland and Riverside)

The housing market had crashed in 2008, and while the market was still at the bottom when we bought the house, it was starting to turn around and come back. We wanted the crappiest house in the nicest neighborhood we could afford. So we bought this house in North Hollywood, and it was a sketchy neighborhood—not ghetto, thankfully.

At that time, developers were buying houses and flipping them immediately and making a $100,000 profit by coming in and taking these houses built in the 1950s, gutting them, and doing a basic, soulless renovation with poly laminate flooring, IKEA cabinets, gray paint, and stainless-steel appliances.

Developers and investors were buying these houses for cash, so we knew we were going to have a challenge actually getting accepted on a purchase because the market was so hot. We were an FHA loan, which is kind of the crappiest loan you could get, but that’s all we could do. We knew we had to do something to stand out.

So we found this house in NoHo for sale, and the woman who was selling it grew up in it and inherited it when her mother passed away. We wrote a letter to her that said something to the effect of: “We know that there are people with cash who will pay you over your asking price, but they’re just gonna do this soulless development, and we hope that you don’t want that to happen to your house and that you’ll take a chance on us. We’re artists. We’re creatives. We think your house is adorable. We love everything about it, and we want to give it a new life and beauty. Also, Amber is pregnant and actually plans to birth the baby in the home. We have two cats named Owen and Milton, and we hope and pray that you will accept our offer and let us take over your home.”

Well, as luck and goodness would have it, she did! Despite all odds, she chose us to purchase this house.

We had never owned a home before, and we had never lived in a construction zone before, so we didn’t really understand the magnitude of what we were doing (literally the story of our lives). And without having a plan of what exactly we were going to do, we walked into the house with sledgehammers and immediately tore down the walls to make it an open floor plan and completely tore out the kitchen.

Mind you, I was nine months pregnant, so Eric made the bedroom for me before he started on anything else. He hung the chandelier and painted the walls so we had a little sanctuary space, and that room kept me sane for the next two years as we lived in the construction zone.

I remember how stressed Eric was because we didn’t have water in the kitchen and my delivery date was quickly approaching. He was so relieved the day he was able to say to me, “Amber, you can finally have the baby because the kitchen water is turned back on!”

Up to that point, my mother-in-law was washing our dishes in the bathtub, as we were basically camping in the house.

Our daughter was born on February 20th under that chandelier, and we continued to renovate and live in a construction zone, with plastic over doorways so that we wouldn’t get drywall dust in our bedroom, etc.

From the moment I held our daughter in my arms, I wanted to move back to Arkansas and raise her with her grandparents and cousins surrounding her. Eric wasn’t ready to leave the city yet, so I had to wait patiently (hahaha!!!) until he was. Thankfully, his parents came out multiple times to work with us on the house.

It wasn’t until our daughter was about 18 months old, and she woke up in the morning and instead of asking for us, she said she wanted to see her Neena and Papa. And that’s when Eric finally caved and said, “Yes, let’s set a date to move home.”

Eric and I believe that we are made in the image of God, the ultimate Prime Creator, and so we can manifest our dreams easily. We write our dreams down and speak them out loud, and we hold the feeling in our hearts and bodies of the actuality happening. We don’t pray with the feeling of hope and need—we pray with the feeling of gratitude and completeness.

We decided to write down the number we wanted to sell the house for, the number of days we wanted to be in escrow, and what day we were going to actually go to market and sell the house.

We worked around the clock pushing toward that date, and we finally made it to our finish and go-to-market date. Within six days of listing, we had 30 offers on that house—well over asking price and literally the number we had written and posted on the refrigerator!

When it was time to choose the people who were going to purchase the house, our real estate agent assumed we would be choosing the most open-and-shut choice—a guy with cash who had no contingencies, ready to just purchase the house and walk away within days.

However, we received a letter. And the letter was from a young, engaged couple, and they told us that they were in love with absolutely everything that we had done to the house, and they could not have envisioned a house with more character. And they even named the house the Mad Hatteras House.

I was pissed that I didn’t think of that name because I’m actually really good with names and puns and words. The Mad Hatteras House!!! So cute!!

They told us that they had an FHA loan and that they had to sell their condo in order to be able to purchase our house. And so they needed 45-day closing. And they were also engaged and getting married and had a honeymoon in that 45-day window.

Both Eric and our realtor told me I was absolutely crazy that I wanted them to have the house. But I was completely adamant and said, “This couple—they are the ones to have our ‘baby’, this house. We built this special place, and we were gifted this place because we showed our hearts and wrote a letter and showed that woman that we were the right ones to steward this little house.”

So we chose the Mad Hatteras  couple. And I knew—I told them—this is going to work out. Everything’s going to be okay.

We had the 45-day closing period instead of a 30-day period. But it worked.

Due to hard work, visualization and manifestation, the help of Eric’s incredible parents, and grit, we doubled our money, and we walked out of California.

As we were in the closing stage of the house renovation, I was also in the works of selling my wedding planning company, Amber Events, to my associate Nira, who had been with me for years. We created a unique concept where she would pay me a percentage of the contracts she booked for the next two years.

When we left California, we road-tripped through New Zealand for six weeks in order to breathe before we came to Northwest Arkansas to start the new chapter of our life. We knew we were going to buy an old building to turn into a wedding venue, so we needed time to breathe, dream, and write down visions of the next chapter.

Chapter Two: The Naming of the Ravington

Eric and I left Los Angeles after living there for 14 years and hustling hard and fast. Before we got home to Arkansas,

We wanted a bridge time where I didn’t have to incessantly check emails and be on my phone, so we went to New Zealand for six weeks and road-tripped both islands.

I have a cousin that lives down there that we home-based with and road-tripping with two-and-a-half-year-old is not as delightful as it sounds. There wasn’t a whole lot we could do except visit hot springs, and looking back at it now, as an energy healer and a grid worker, that’s exactly what we should have been doing.

As we drove, we would talk about our dreams of what we wanted in this wedding venue we were going to create. We wanted high ceilings, preferably a historic building, preferably brick, and something with a ton of character and an outside space. At one point, we even considered what is now the Onyx headquarters in downtown Rogers, but because at that time there was a wedding venue less than one block away, we knew that that wasn’t the place for us.

The next big challenge was naming this place. Names are so important, and it needed to be something new and innovative, yet sound majestic and fun at the same time. I grew up reading Jane Austen books and always loved the names of the estates and cottages in those books.

Some of our favorite venues in Los Angeles were Marvimon, Viviana, Carondelet, and so on. The names sounded mysterious and regal, opulent and accessible all at the same time. I think we were on the South Island, and we decided to go visit a potter’s colony from the 70’s that had turned into a tourist attraction.

This area was owned by a man who did pottery, and it kind of became a hippie hub for artists. He built narrow-gauge tracks up into the mountain to pull the clay out of the mountain, and over the years, everything turned into an art experience. Totally our jam, totally our vibe.

As we got on this little train and started chugging up the mountain, there were whimsical gnome faces coming out of the walls, and dragons and beasts of whimsical creation. Apparently, potters do a lot of acid—or at least they did back in the seventies—there at the very top of the mountain. We came to the little train station, and the conductor on the train said over the microphone, “This is where the parties really happened!!!”

Chapter Three :  Purchasing the Ravington.

We arrived in Northwest Arkansas on June 27th, after spending six weeks road tripping in New Zealand. We had a few properties we wanted to look at that fit our specs, and on June 30th, 2015 we walked into Stubbs Antiques at 293 North Main Street in Centerton, Arkansas.

Eric is a very slow-moving decision maker, and he shocked me completely when we walked through the doors and he said, “this is it.” I, at first, wasn’t super keen on the fact that there wasn’t a big outdoor space, just a gravel parking lot next to the building, but I trust his intuition, and after being in there for a few minutes, I completely knew this was The Ravington as well.

The building had been for sale for about a year, and we had just come from Los Angeles and didn’t know if we should offer more or less than the $280,000 the Stubbs family was asking. In LA, you couldn’t even buy a condo in the ghetto for $280,000!

Our agent told us to offer $260,000, and we did. They countered back at $270,000, and we told them, “we will give that to you if you will let us have any of the antiques in the building”.  They agreed to our counter offer and told us to come shopping and let us know what we wanted. That was probably one of the most fun shopping trips I’ve EVER gone on! I walked through a 7,000-square-foot antique store and put a post-it note on every single thing I wanted!!!

The big elk head up in the mezzanine was hanging on the balcony wall, and we had no idea how big he actually was, but we thought he was super cool so we put a tag on him too!

Throughout our renovation period, people told me that they were so frustrated that when the antique store was being liquidated, because everything they wanted to purchase had a big sign on it that said Gustafson, and they had no idea what a Gustafson was!

So we had an offer on the building, and then we needed to get a bank loan. One of my friends in LA was a dynamite graphic designer and made a beautiful business plan for us.

We modeled our business structure the way some of my favorite venues in LA were modeled : it was just the banquet hall with a day-of site manager to protect the building. No services were to be offered such as catering or alcohol or rentals or anything like that, just the space. We wanted to build the type of business where we could homeschool our kids and travel and have freedom.

So we created this business plan with vision boards and renderings of what we wanted the building to turn into, and we took it to the bank. We had $150,000 in a bank account for seed money from the sale of our house in Los Angeles, and we got quotes from a construction company, and they told us with the purchase of the building and the renovation, if we took out a loan of $544,000, we would be able to do this renovation. I guess this is the point I should mention that our contractors were kind of a joke and didn’t even know that the building needed to have a sprinkler put in. That was an $80,000 line item we were not expecting in our budget. (just for funsies : today the same sprinkler system would cost about $350,000 to put in the building. F.U., inflation.)

We almost didn’t get to close on building because two huge things came up towards the very end: 1. It was discovered that the back corner of the kitchen, probably two feet of it, sits in the floodplain and that is no bueno for commercial buildings. 2. We did not have enough of a down payment because the building did not appraise for the number it needed to be appraised for.

Issue number one was solved by taking out a $7000 flood insurance policy. Issue number two was a huge miracle that I don’t have liberty to share, but an Angel stepped in and covered  the difference of what we needed.

Miracle upon Miracles!

Why am I telling the story? Because we have 13 days in which to save The Ravington. Check out www.savetheravington.com for information as to how you can help.

Stay tuned for chapter 4

Chapter  4 : Renovating The Ravington

We closed on the sale of the Ravington on September 21st, 2015. We were absolutely elated and had no clue what we were about to walk into! Again, this is the story of our lives. At that beginning point, we were driving an hour each way from Eric's parents' house out in Goshen to the Ravington, but thankfully there was an apartment upstairs in the building attached to the Ravington, the old bank building.

We were able to move into that apartment and literally live next door as we started renovating the building. That worked out for great for Eric. With his ADHD, he hyper-focuses on things and works 18 hours a day when he's super into a project.

We figured, and our contractors told us, that it would be a four- or five-month renovation, but we truly had no idea what it would take to jump through the proper hoops to get the building approved and our certificate of occupancy from the City of Centerton. We found out that we had to put a sprinkler system in the building—an $80,000 line item that had not been in the original budget.

Not only did we have to put in a sprinkler system, but we also had to bore under Main Street to reach the water main. Because Main Street is a state highway, we could not just cut the street.

We started doing hard-hat tours during construction, and I would show vision boards and renderings of what we planned to do. We made a trip down to Fort Worth for my granddad's funeral, and while there we went into an antique store. The man who owned the store traveled the world buying architectural salvage pieces and shipping them back to the U.S.

We were in the antique store, and they had just gotten a shipment of doors from India. We were walking around and looking at them when there was an enormous door on its side, still packaged in wrapping paper. I could see a turquoise point sticking out the top. I pulled the paper back, shined my flashlight down, and saw the color and the shape of the door. It was The Maharaja!!!

We went up to the cashier and asked how much they were asking for the door. They told us $3,000, and we said, “We’ll buy it, but we can’t come back and pay for it and get it just yet.”

A few weeks later, when we called to make a payment on the door, they said they were so sad we had called them back because when they unpackaged the door and stood it up, they realized how unique and spectacular it was and knew they could get about $10,000 for it—but they would honor that rate for us. Another miracle!

We started booking weddings during the renovation. It was exciting to book dates in an unfinished space, and people were really able to understand what we were doing.

Eric worked nonstop and literally wire-brushed *every single* brick in the building. One night, he was driving around on a skid steer in the building, blasting music and having a glass of wine, about midnight Centerton PD walked in and asked him if he belonged in that space. Eric said he did, and they laughed and hung out as he played on the skid steer—boys and their toys!

As we were going through the renovation, every week I was writing $20,000 checks to our contractors, yet we weren't even close to doing the top-out work. We were still in the rough-end stage of everything, and I started getting nervous that we were running out of money.

I started asking the contractors, “Are we going to be okay?” and they kept assuring me, “Yes, we're fine.” In February 2016, they came to me and said, “You're out of money, and we need more to finish this space. You're going to have to go back to the bank and ask for more.”

At that point, the bank had no choice but to give us another hundred-thousand-dollar loan because they needed us to get this project off the ground and open. That hundred thousand dollars was supposed to finish the building.

But the first week, when I wrote that huge check again and nothing had been done, Eric and I sat down and realized that we had to project-manage this ourselves. The house we renovated in California, we project-managed on our own, and we figured we had no choice but to do this.

Side note: I was pregnant with our son, and that was quite an interesting time to be pregnant.

With my wedding-planning background, I was easily able to manage people and challenging situations, but finding crew was the most challenging thing.

We found random guys on Craigslist, friends of friends, and it was hard to find guys who would actually show up on time and work all the way through a day. A few times we had to bail our boys out of  jail because they would drive over from Oklahoma and get pulled over for out-of-date tags or warrants for arrest. It was quite a colorful time with many colorful people.

Our first wedding was slated for May 26th and our grand opening for May 19th.

However, as we clicked closer and closer to grand opening day, it became very apparent that we were not going to be done and have our certificate of occupancy. One night, after a city planning council meeting across the street from us, the question was asked over there if we were going to be done in time?  Someone said, “What they  really need is some help.”

At 9:00 p.m. on a Wednesday night, almost all of the City of Centerton City Council came over, put on gloves, and worked for us for HOURS. It was the most beautiful miracle and such a testament to neighbors helping neighbors out.

This is the type of community that Centerton is.

This is the type of world we want to live in.

This is the type of world we want to build for our children.

Miracle upon Miracles!

Why am I telling the story? Because we have 12 days in which to save The Ravington. Check out www.savetheravington.com for information as to how you can help.

Stay tuned for chapter 5