A single-coat faux finish.  Yes, “forget what you know about faux finishing.”  Michelangelo is a single can of paint that lets you achieve the faux finishing look that you desire.  All it takes is just one coat of paint and a simple tool to create “endless possibilities.”  Once the paint is applied, apply pressure and movement with a basic tool, such as putty knife or sponge, to create depth and darker shades.  The color range is created by what tool you select.  You can work with the paint as much or little as you’d like to create the right look.  And if you mess up, just paint right over it and start over again.

 This is a great product for the first time faux finisher.  Not only is it cost-effective, but it’s easy to use and far less time consuming than other faux finishers.

For more information visit www.MichelangeloHome.com or come visit our helpful paint department.

We’ve just received an innovative new masking tape called Frog Tape. What could be innovative about masking tape you ask? You’d be surprised. It’s green. No, that’s not the innovative part. The innovative part is the way that frog Tape actually seals on the edge and does not let paint weep in.

We’ve all painted with masking tape being very careful to lay down a clean straight edge. Then you peel off the tape only to find that some paint has seeped under the edge of the tape and now you have a not so clean line. Frog Tape is designed to eliminate this problem. Frog Tape has polymers embedded in to the adhesive layer of the tape. These absorb the liquid paint and expand to seal off the edge of the tape, not letting any paint get underneath. Peel off the Frog Tape and you’ll see a very clean edge - just what you wanted in the first place.

For more information visit FrogTape.com, or come see the tape here at our store!

So Long story short for us this year is that we owe our customers a great deal of thanks. After something like 18 years in Loveland; and the construction of new stores including Home Depot, Lowes, and (another) Super Wal-Mart in our little town; we just ended our best year ever. Our total sales were 7% from 2006.

We had some help from the weather among other things a few times but the fact of the matter of is this kind of performance just wouldn’t be possible if Loveland wasn’t a small town community where our friends like to come in and shop us year after year. We are doing everything we can to make our store better (we all know there are things we need to do better), but here at the beginning we just want to say THANK YOU for a great year.

We look forward to another great year in 2008! We’ll keep you bringing you more service, more knowledge, and more new products… hopefully it help us to get you thinking of us just a little more often. Thanks again, see you in the store!!

I use what is called a feed reader (Google Reader in my case) to keep an eye on interesting news feeds from around the internet. Well I’ll be darned if yesterday in my feed reader didn’t find an article from the Coloradoan (the Fort Collins newspaper) featuring our friends at Downtown ACE Hardware and the fact they are the last store in town to find LED Christmas lights.

You can check out the article by clicking here. Nice seeing a local business get recognized, especially our friends Tom, Jeremy, and the crew over at Downtown ACE!

Shiny New Pot Rack, originally uploaded by dzvette53.

I recently moved in with my girlfriend Shannon, and as a result, for the first time in my life I live in a place that actually has a touch of class. So just to show that I could contribute to our great looking townhouse (and since I have ugly but NON-STICK pots and pans that are good for cooking and she has beautiful stainless pots and pans that are terrible for actual cooking), I brought home from the store this black pot rack with silver grate that looks fantastic hanging over our island. The rack is cool product #1… it looks great and is easy to install with a few drywall anchors.

But what I was really impressed was cool product #2 I found as part of this project. That was MAAS metal polish. The old stainless pans needed a face lift going from production cooking duty to purely display and WOW did MAAS do the trick. Totally impressed, so much so I ran around the house doing all the faucets and most anything else that was shiny metal I could find. Anyway, I highly recommend it (and of course it came from ACE also). More info on it available at www.maasinc.com.

ACE Bag Sale, originally uploaded by dzvette53.

So some of you may have been for the ACE bag sale we had where anything you could fit in the bag, you got 20% off on. Well, I’m not exactly sure this was what all of us ACE stores had in mind but what the hell?!

How could you NOT give this guy the discount!!! This is a fun sale every time we do it, hopefully a few of you got in on it and got a 20% discount.

The owner of the store, Chuck, has stolen his son-our store computer genius, Jr, and taken him on a pheasant hunt in North Dakota. So we will getback to regular updates next week. I can tell you though I just wrote our Benelli, Franchi, Stoeger and Uberti deal for 2008 and Benelli has some new guns coming out. The new Legacy Sport is really nice. Its the standard Legacy with a high rib, ported barrel, high grade wood and extended tubes. We have our first one already and its beautiful. There is going to be a Ultralight 20 gauge too next year. I got to see one and it shouldbe a big seller. The rep says they should be shipping before the end of the year. The rumor of a 20 gauge Stoeger 2000, a 3 1/2 inch 12 gauge 2000, and a Franchi I-12 in 3 1/2 seem to be just rumors for the moment. If I hear anymore I’ll let you know though. We have been doing lots of trades so next week the update should be really good. Check it out at www.orchardshardware.com I’ll let you know how the pheasant hunt goes for the boys too. Hopefully they are having a great time. Jr has been working so hard he hasnt even been able to go shoot Prairie Dogs this year. Thats a crime!

-Mike

Well like everyone else, we here at Orchards Hardware are totally impressed by the recent work of our Colorado Rockies. 21 out of 22 games and a perfect post season thus far, it really is the most prolific playoff run I have ever seen in any sport. Not a lot else to say about it other than we hope the keep it up and there is a big reason to party in downtown Denver on October 28 after Game 4! (And also that I really have to figure out some way to pull off getting a World Series ticket)

We had an exciting weekend this past weekend. The big semi-annual ACE Hardware convention was this weekend and for the first time in several years it was in Denver. That means we had a chance to get a bunch of our employees down to the convention center to experience. I hadn’t been myself since I was a kid really so I enjoyed spending Friday afternoon and Saturday morning checking things out. Here is a cell phone pic of the “Welcome to Denver” sign in the airport for all the Acers flying in I saw in the airport Sunday night on my way out to Philadelphia:

I would bet Clark will have a post on the show coming up too since he is really the head of operations when it comes to that sort of thing. But… speaking of interesting welcome signs, check out this one on one of Denver’s most famous strip clubs right across from the convention center! What kind of people do they think we Acers are exactly?

Anyway, good show, and we’ll have exciting new products and news to follow I’m sure.

Well, in case you didn’t hear it as the lead story on NPR the other morning like I did, ACE Corporate really screwed up. See ACE Hardware is Cooperative… the majority of stores are individually owned and operated and ACE Hardware Coporation is all of our stores’ largest supplier. The store owners all hold stock in ACE Hardware Corporation so the store owners own the company. Well, as part of that arrangement, we were very disappointed to hear that ACE Corporate made a very big error in their accounting. Very long story short, they significantly overstated inventory on the balance sheet meaning the company has a much lower book value than expected.

At this point there are many more questions than answers for corporate but it looks like it is going to hurt a little. The good news for Orchards ACE Hardware (and our customers) is that we are in a strong position and will have no problem weathering the storm. We are confident everything will turn out fine and even if there were any problems with ACE, we will get our product from somewhere else, and continue on… business as usual. This is what we did over 10 years when we switched to ACE during Coast to Coast’s problems.

Most we hope going forward that our biggest supplier keeps a little closer eye on the books. Mistakes happen and I’m sure they’ve learned a valuable lesson!