Riverside Home B&B and Wedding Venue Update (Good news!!)
Wow this has been a long process!! After some setbacks we finally got the business plan done! I’m excited to say that we got word from the bank that they want to move forward with our loan! A pre-approval of sorts. We are working on an SBA loan which will be a long process to get to final approval. We have at least crossed the first hurdle.
It has been almost 2 years since we acquired this property and I never dreamed it would take this long to get it up and running, but here we are. It took a year to get the title straightened out. Then our daughter got married in April of 2022 and 300+ people came to our HOUSE. Over the summer I got the dreaded C virus and have had some health challenges. We had to put the RH on the backburner for a while.
The last several months we have been researching and working on the business plan. I cannot stress to you how much research has gone into this project. When I am not at work at the tag office, I've been spending my time researching the details of running a B&B and a wedding venue (which I do have some experience in (read above lol)). My husband has been working on getting the construction numbers together and I appreciate him so much. He has been meeting contractors at the house nonstop for months.
Now that the business plan is done, we are going to all say a prayer that a bank will even loan us this astounding amount of money. I'm trying not to pass out thinking about it. When I bought this place on a whim I was not thinking about how much money it was going to take, but that someone NEEDED to save this amazing old house! I have a greater understanding now of why people let houses sit and fall into disrepair sadly enough. Now that we have the bids, it is going to cost us about 3 times what we thought it would initially. We plan on doing a full restoration of the home plus an addition on the back. We have already salvaged 2 historic homes for this project and have a lot of things in storage. However, salvaging and going back with old materials is adding to the cost. Having weddings at the property is the only way we can work this out to be financially feasible. A bed and breakfast on its own will not be able to pay the bills. We already live in an old home on some acreage, so we do not want to live there ourselves. We want this to be an amazing upscale historic property for everyone to come visit. We will be documenting every step of the renovation in the Forgotten Oklahoma group on Facebook and Instagram.
When we first bought the property, we had several people that donated money to the project, and we also sell merchandise here on our website that goes towards this. Rest assured the money was used to pay for the lawyer fees, dumpsters, and cleanup of the property so far. We cannot thank you enough for supporting us. We have put in thousands of dollars to this project out of our own pockets as well.
If you are the praying kind, please say a prayer that we will be able to get final approval on the construction loan and be able to move forward. From the very beginning when I saw the house, I believed that God had his hand in this but I'm having a hard time seeing the future of it with this huge financial obstacle in the way. It is causing me a tremendous amount of stress and anxiety.
Thank you for all of your support so far. You don't know how much it means to me.