When Connie and Buddy Sanchez were looking for an office for their stained glass business they stumbled on an abandoned, messy building. Connie describes the whole scene as, "overwhelmingly depressing." Built as a hardware store in 1926, the building later became a Piggly Wiggly grocery store with office space upstairs. The building’s long and varied history is what they loved about it, but the conversion process was tough. Connie and Buddy slept in the room that used to be a medical lab because it had a sink and cooked with a microwave and a grill on the roof.
The renovation process took a total of eight years to complete. They also tried to preserve the building's character. They left the office room numbers on the doors, the women’s sign on the bathroom and the plate glass door and sidelights downstairs were saved. They also preserved the transom windows and the glass in the doors and changed them to stained glass.
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