Our Story: Part 6 - The Landlord We Wanted to Keep

So the Foundry in all of its splendor and promise didn’t quite work out the way we’d hoped. By this point, we’d scoured Muskoka, looking for a place to call home. What we really were was a homeless company, constantly adapting to make ends meet, wandering around with our students in tow, praying for a solution.

Then came Mike Hammond. Mike was a terrific landlord who happened to have space available in a large warehouse building beneath The Hub in Huntsville. It turned out we were not the only homeless business in Hunstville, and Mike had extended his generosity to the Muskoka North Good Food Co-Op as well, as they worked to build their own permanent space. That is how we came to share a space with the good folks of the co-op (which became the place where I fell in love with lattes and learned how to make a great miso soup).

We divided our space from the Co-Op using a wall of colourful saris - a brilliant idea by Kelli Ebbs, the driving force behind the co-op (and the one who saved me with the miso soup recipe one night when I was left to my own devices for dinner while Phil trained for 3 weeks in Toronto - Phil is the cook in our household).

Since he couldn’t offer the space as a permanent home for us, Mike let us use the space for free for 6 months. While we were still stressing hard about finding a long-term solution, we were incredibly thankful that we’d been saved yet again. Although the move still meant losing students and nearly starting over yet again.

We stayed in the warehouse from January to May, 2017. All the while we searched for a space and came up empty-handed.