Welcome to Jux•Ta•Posh!

HI EVERYONE!! (Or that one person besides my mom and dad who is reading my blog ;-)) WELCOME!!! I can't tell you how excited I am that you have taken the time out of your day to read up a little on my world over here in The Depot, downtown in Lubbock, TX! I'm sooo behind on even starting this blog that I am not even sure where to begin... So let's just start at the beginning. Where does that that even begin?! See this is what I do... I overthink everything into nonexistence and therefore here I am 8.5 years later with no blog-ha! But I guess that is why they came up with the expression "better late than never!' So here I go! If you know me, you can just skip all of this first blog- you know the story. ;-) If you are new here or just always wondered where JUX came from, here's the scoop!

I was born in 1979, raised in Corpus Christi, TX. Oh, y'all didn't really want me to start from the beginning beginning?! Ha! Ok, well, without being lengthy and boring you with the baby stories, I will say this about myself: from a very young age, I have always loved rearranging, reimagining and using what I had available to make my space look "cute," but never in a million years imagined I could make a living out of it! My mom likes to tell the story of when I was 5 or 6 years old I wanted to rearrange my room and said "ok I want to move my closet over here, my window over here..." I guess that is when I should have realized home design was going to be my love and passion.  But I didn't. I ended up getting my degree in Psychology from Texas A&M University Corpus Christi because I have been known to have a bleeding heart and wanted to save the world! Not as easy of a task as I thought at 23. But that's what we do, we dream big at that age. I married my college sweetheart in 2002, we moved to West Texas and fell in love with the seasons, the lack of humidity and most of all THE PEOPLE!!! Oh my word everyone in Lubbock is soooo nice! After 4 years of trying to balance wanting to save the world and being tough in social work, I realized 3 things. How AMAZING my parents were, how awful so many children grow up, and that social work just wasn't for me...  My heart goes to those that are strong enough and have made it their mission to be there to help the kiddos of the world that are struggling with a stable family life. Y'all are AMAZING!

As a shift in career choices was weighing heavily on my heart, I decided to get my certification in Staging in 2006, became a realtor in 2007, and 7 years after that I opened a booth at a local antique mall with my sister-in-law that we named JUX-TA-POSH!! It was a word we made up from the dictionary word, juxtaposition. At this moment in life, I realized I enjoyed the decorating of a home much more than the actual buying and selling process. So, once again a shift in career choices was happening to get me to a place I could find my forever career love... designing and helping home owners LOVE their home and be comfortable in it! Now just so you know, junking has ALWAYS been in my blood. My mom taught me early in life to look beyond the new and pretty things (that was usually a little out of our price range) and redo what was within the budget! Have you heard of Canton?! Well if you know it, you know it is a junker's paradise, a girls trip extraordinaire, a hunt of what you never knew you needed but when you are leaving you know you can't live without that treasure!! The excitement of the hunt in Canton has made my heart flutter from a very young age when I would go with my mom and aunt. I was always coming back with some huge piece of moulding from an old house that I would one day make into my current day mantle, a replica of the Sinclair Dinosaur that I still have in my backyard, you know those pieces you never knew you needed until you saw them and can't imagine your home without it! Ok ok enough about Canton, obviously I am obsessed and it holds a special place in my heart... :-) Moving on. After a year of renting this 10x10 booth in a local antique store, my sister-in-law and I quickly realized 10x10 wasn't big enough for our vision and we had a niche that is just a little different than what you would typically see in an antique store. So it was time to go big or go close up shop... and I am no quitter! Ha! So on my way to pay a speeding ticket downtown (yeah driving has never been one of my strong suits...) I drove by a vacant building that one of my favorite local shops was in years prior but had moved across town. There, in the window calling to me, was a huge FOR LEASE sign and at that moment I was so determined that my shop roots and soul needed to be planted in downtown Lubbock! Now most would say downtown Lubbock is the WORST location for retail. It is surrounded by bars, homeless people and abandoned buildings. But I say, the bones of these old buildings provide a backdrop you can't get from a strip mall, a feeling you can't get from new construction, and stories from folks of the past that share their memories of their dad, mom, grandpa or grandmas taking them to that building and the good they remember of another time.  THAT you don't get in a newer part of town.

So for 4.5 years I toughed it out, with not a ton of traffic but enough to keep me afloat and my fire lit.  In 2017 I took a TOTAL leap of FAITH and decided to expand my dreams of JUX-TA-POSH and what it could bring to Lubbock and those who visited downtown!  I bought the building directly across the street from my original location to make my own and my store's forever HOME!! JUX-TA-POSH was growing from 3,000 sqft to a 2 story building totaling 13,000 sqft!! How in the world was I ever going to fill it up?! Knowing that I didn't want to get too big for my britches, I decided to just focus on the main floor. This building at 1701 Buddy Holly Ave started as a Wholesale Variety Store in the 50s, was a Wholesale Florist Shop in the 80s, I have been told of stories from the 90s and early 2000s that people saw their first concert in here, met for church, and the most recently before I acquired it, was a homeless outreach and soup kitchen.  Unfortunately, it hadn't had the best care in its most recent years. But on a good note, it had been gutted so I saw a blank slate, a canvas and beyond a small water leak in the wall, I saw BRICK!!! ALLLLLL of the googly eyes for the potential of what the walls of this old building could look like!  TRUE, AUTHENTIC, and oh so old BRICK walls!!! If my heart could have jumped out of my body and done the Macarena it would have!!

The next 6 months, my husband and I poured our blood, sweat and sleepless nights into this shell! We chipped plaster off of the interior walls to expose the brick on 3 of the interior walls, we refinished the floors, put in new windows, the works! We wanted to bring LIFE back into this building!! And after pushing our bodies, and our pocketbooks, WAY further than what we ever knew was possible, we opened in the new location July 1, 2017! Was it anywhere close to done with construction? Nope. Were all of the vignettes placed perfectly and ready to be viewed with exact curation of items? Nope. Was I fully rested and ready to greet every customer with full undivided attention and poise? ABSOLUTELY NOT!!! But this show was happening whether my outer shell of a body was ready or not, my soul was ready and had been waiting for this moment for years! People came, they supported, they encouraged, and they looked beyond the disaster. What's funny is 4.5 years later, I am still apologizing for the disaster, trying to get all of the vignettes perfectly place and loving every minute of it!