A labor of love...

After months of work, I must admit that getting The Pink Home Shop off the ground is proving rather more difficult than I imagined ~ and I knew it wasn't going to be easy. The creative side is, of course, the fun part. The paperwork, not so much. I thought I had all the required paperwork figured out but when I called City Hall to ask a question yesterday, I learned I had to fill out additional paperwork they had neglected to mention before. None of it has anything to do with what I want to do, mind you, but it is required nonetheless. I'm up to six forms/applications and three fees and counting ~ it's as though California would rather do anything than let a person start a very, very small little home business. I even thought that perhaps I had been misunderstood as to what I was doing ~ you wouldn't think selling prints and note cards and the like online would require an environmental survey and a water runoff form ~ but I was assured that in fact, all of the forms are required, even if I put N/A on nearly every blank and sign it. Sigh...

As the urge to throw in the towel grew greater, a whining session with one of my best friends managed to get me righted. I realized that if I want to get my wares on Etsy, and I very much do, this is what has to be done so I might as well accept it and deal with it and move on. The only alternative is to wait until I move back East to the Carolinas, where there are not quite so many fees and forms, but that would mean putting things off for more than a year, and I can't imagine doing that. It just wouldn't feel right.

So my labor of love is still going. (The photo above is one of my latest). All the forms will be filed next week and, hopefully, all will move ahead as planned and my little Etsy shop will be open in a month or so. Fingers crossed.

I am linking to Pink Saturday at How Sweet the Sound.

Photo by The Pink Home