Owners hope to boost downtown

With their business’s recent move, the owners of Remember When are hoping to help revitalize Portland’s downtown, “one block at a time.”

Cindy Shawver and her daughter Missy Puterbaugh started their antique, primitives and home decor business back in 2006 at a house on Meridian Street. Their new location at 103 W. Main St. opened May 4, with new hours of 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday on the first and third weekends of each month.

They had enjoyed housing the business in a two-story home on Portland’s south side, but after Shawver fell and broke her shoulder last summer, they almost closed the business for good. Puterbaugh convinced her mother to hold off on retiring, and promised her they would move to a single-level location.

“I wasn’t ready to close yet, although I can’t run the business because I work full time, so it was up to her to do that,” said Puterbaugh, who is the Portland City Court clerk and works for Loy’s Real Estate and Auction. “And then we kind of decided maybe we need some businesses downtown and if we could build downtown, one block at a time.”

So they sold the house to its new owner, chose the new location — adjacent to Loy’s — and began overhauling it last fall. Puterbaugh originally hoped she would only need to do cosmetic work on the place, but soon discovered that wasn’t the case.

“It was a mess. I brought (Shawver) up here and she looked at it, and I was like, ‘Just floors and walls, that’s all it’s going to take,’” Puterbaugh said. “Well, it ended up taking a little more than that.”

Puterbaugh did most of the work getting the store ready to open, with some help from her husband and friends. She remembers the exact day she began putting up the drywall — Nov. 1. The place wasn’t ready to move into until April.

After that, it was painting, decorating, arranging the furniture and rearranging the furniture to make everything that was in their old site would fit. Their new space is about 600 square feet smaller than the house, Puterbaugh estimates. After some long nights in the shop, they managed to get all the furniture and other items in, except for four pieces.

“What we had done before was decorate a home,” Shawver said. “Here we had to make areas … but when it finally kind of clicked with us then things came together … pretty easy, I’m not going to say quick because I’ve never been quick at anything.”

They’ve tried to keep the atmosphere of the business the same for their customers, putting up the same style sign in their front window that was at the house and the same type of fencing up in the windows.

“I posted to Facebook, ‘We may not have the charm as the old house did, but we still have the character that comes with the business,’” Puterbaugh said, referring to her mother.

“She’s the other half of that character,” Shawver responded.

The duo acknowledges that their situation is unusual, and not everyone could work with a family member so closely. They try to split the work up 50-50 — although Shawver prefers the paperwork and Puterbaugh prefers the hands-on tasks — and they go shopping for the store’s merchandise together in Ohio.

“She says she likes to do the grunt work, that’s what she calls it, cause I like the decorating,” Shawver said. “We do make a good pair … we each have our own interests that we can bring together.”

“If nothing else, we enjoy each other and we have fun,” Puterbaugh said.

They’ve always shared a love of antiques, and both of their homes are filled with them. While she had always enjoyed shopping for pieces, in the back of her mind Shawver said she always wanted her own place.

“In 2005, my other daughter, we had gone to (an antique market) in Ohio,” Shawver said. “And coming home I said, gosh it just gives me the itch to open something.”

At the same time that Shawver decided to open a store, Puterbaugh found out that the house on Meridian was coming up for auction. They went to see the house and fell in love with it. Shawver was a Jay County School Corporation employee at the time.

“In six days we decided to open the shop and we made sure we could get financing to buy the shop, and I decided to retire from the school corporation,” Shawver said. “We didn’t know what we were doing for anything, just knew that we loved the people coming in and enjoyed that. I think that’s what’s kept us going all these years.”

Since their reopening last month, Puterbaugh and Shawver said they’ve had good reactions to the new storefront. They are hoping the new store brings more foot traffic because of its location downtown and increased visibility on the corner.

“So far it’s been good, it’s not been just people coming in, we’ve had a lot of purchases too,” Shawver said. “(I hope) people will start thinking about local places to shop before they think about going out of town.”

“Retail is hard,” Puterbaugh added. “But it’s those little businesses that are going to keep the town alive.”