When we moved last year into our new facility, we knew that the building we moved into was a non-descriptive concrete block exterior and that had little or no “curb appeal”!

As soon as we moved in, Betty and I started thinking about how to improve the appearance of the store.

We had seen murals in the downtown Durham area. She went into the store and asked the owner who the painter was.

This led us to Michael Brown’s website(www.muralsbymichaelbrown.com). I thought we were sold on the mural idea!

I finally scraped all my courage together and called Michael Brown’s number. He agreed to meet with us and discuss our plan (I was not sure that we could afford an artist to do this !). To my surprise, we were assured by Michael that his prices were very reasonable, so we decided to go ahead with the idea.

Next issue to tackle was, what do we want in a mural? We starting kicking some ideas around, looked at a lot of postcards and posters, and the one we all agreed upon was an old poster of stick figures from the 70’s!  Michael was on board and proceeded with computer designing some models for approval.

There was no contest and we were all thrilled with this design he came up with!  Go ahead Michael!... but he was booked for 4-5 months (that put a damper on our mood!) And then on September 12, there he was and he started painting. It was a joy to see him working and even bigger pleasure to see his enthusiasm in what he is doing.

We are absolutely in love with our mural (our old dog McBuddy is even in the mural, can you find him?). It really made the bland wall look more appealing, we can use it as an identifier for Customers who ask for directions (“You can’t miss it, it’s the building with the funny marching band painted on the wall…”).

 In short, we enjoy it, we love it and we hope it will spread  joy and good vibes to everyone driving by and coming into the store!