Hi, Pedal Peoples! Davey Oil here. One year ago, in June of 2013, Tyler Gillies and myself signed a lease on the space that is now the home of Gillies & Oil Family Cyclery. We expected to spend a few weeks preparing the space and open in late July. It turned out that building our bike shop would take a little longer.

And it was hard!

Here to help me tell the story are a bunch of photos:

The storefront at 8417 Greenwood Ave N. Before us it was a florist, with a dove in a cage in the window. In the past it has been a grocer, a collectible card shop, a hair salon and probably many other things. This block was once the Northern most in the city of Seattle.

Now, we share a block with Neptune Coffee, (phenomenal) and Mr Gyros, (the best) and we are across from the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co., (awesome).

We moved in and got to work! We were smart enough to employ an architect (Michelle Lanker) and later a designer (Kenna Stout). These two helped set a vision for the space and prioritize and organize the work that Tyler and myself (mostly Tyler) would do and that we would hire contractors for.

It is spooky how close to this design the shop wound up!

As we were building out the shop I was out meeting people and setting up some of our first cargo bike sales. This is G&O Family #0002! They showed such faith in us when they bought their cargo bike from a guy in a park!

The build got a lot more complicated. We employed several contractors, especially Mike from Emerald City Contracting and Lacey Carnahan. We had lots of help! It was still hard!

Xtracycle was enthusiastic enough about what we were doing to come out and hold a demo event for their new cargo bike, the EdgeRunner on the sidewalk in front of our construction project! Many of the folks who showed up for that have remained among our most favorite-est customers!

Here's Sean Barton painting our hot hot hot logo, (designed by Dalton Webb! isn't it great?)

Here's an early version of that logo. I still love it so much!

Our shop is graced by a powerful presence. Lion O'Reilly is a mystical cargo bike/ luck dragon/ big cat saint. His pilot is Anielle and her passengers are a rabbit, a duck and a walrus. The painting is by the incredible Stefan Gruber.

It is early September and we are finally ready to open! Literally the last thing we need to do before moving in is stain the enormous bookshelves we had built by Gabe Strand! What could go wrong?