News

Selling their dream at 50 percent off

The owners can only watch as their business is sold piece by piece.

By ERIN SULLIVAN Times Staff Writer
Published September 16, 2007

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Co-owner Donna Williams waits Friday afternoon for customers inside Butterfield's Home Remodeling and Supply in Zephyrhills.
	Stephen J. Coddington | Times

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ZEPHYRHILLS - They closed the store and went to the beach house. Ray and Debbie Williams needed to get away from everything and pray for answers.

Debbie's parents have the house on Treasure Island and they let them have it for the week. Ray and Debbie have four girls, ages 20 to 15, but they only came for half the time. The other few days, it was just Ray and Debbie. Alone and searching.

It's so hard living in limbo, and that's what they had been doing for months on end.

Their business, Butterfield's Home Remodeling and Supply, was failing. They bought it seven years ago, shortly after they moved to Tampa from Jamaica.

The shop was a local institution in Zephyrhills when they took it over. The building itself had been there for about a century at Third Avenue and Gall Boulevard.

Butterfield's catered mostly to snowbirds and locals with RVs and mobile homes; ordering parts, screening in porches, selling sinks and tools and anything else a person might need for a project. Ray and Debbie kept the name because that's what a generation of people knew it as anyway.

They came to love this small town. The ladies at the bank knew Debbie's name and they'd ask each other about their kids. Northerners coming back for the winter would sit down, drink coffee and catch Ray up on stories about grandkids and gossip.

Old men would come in and try to get Ray to sample their homemade whiskey. Ray and Debbie's daughters made signs - I LOVE YOU DADDY - and put them up in his office. Debbie's brother wrote a label underneath the office clock - Ray's Standard Time - since he's always late. Debbie says he still lives on Island Time, which is always about a half-hour off schedule. Her family moved from Jamaica to Toronto when she was young. Her parents are best friends with Ray's parents, so they knew each other when they were children.

But they remet each other when she and her parents came to visit. Debbie was there for three weeks and that was enough time for them to fall in love with each other.

They were in their early 20s and were both born-again Christians. There was a spark between them. They married and Ray owned an auto parts store.

But he says life can be hard in Jamaica, so they moved to Florida - where they both have family. He and Debbie wanted to own a business again and Butterfield's was for sale. Neither knew anything about RVs or mobile homes, but they dove in to learn.

For seven years, they've spent six days a week at this store. That's 2,184 days - give or take a few, for vacations and holidays, of rising before dawn to drive from Tampa to get the store open by 8.

But the town had changed since they bought the business. The big chain stores opened - Home Depot, Lowe's, Wal-Mart, Tractor Supply Co., etc. - and it's hard for a mom-and-pop business to compete.

When Ray and Debbie went to the beach house in June, they went to find out if they should keep fighting - or close. They prayed ... and both of them felt like God said the same thing.

Close the store. Move on.

So they said okay.

They hired a company, Wingate Sales Solutions, to handle the liquidation.

On Aug. 6, a man from the company, Jeff Nelson, moved in to a motel down the street. On Aug. 9, they began liquidating.

Jeff, a man with five pens in his shirt pocket who has the kindly, professional demeanor of a doctor treating a terminal patient, taped up all the posters which scream in neon colors: half off, store closing, everything must go.

Ray winces just looking at them. They are selling everything - the merchandise, the nubby chairs in Ray's office, his desk, the building, everything.

At the end of September, Jeff will move on to another struggling business and this one, Butterfield's, will close.

Ray and Debbie don't know how they will feel. They've been putting off their emotions, to just get through everything that needs to be done.

On that Monday after closing, they say they'll still probably rise before dawn and get ready before realizing there is no where to go.

Ray plans on starting a new business, BMH Remodeling & Installation, which will still deal with the RV and mobile home market.

But first, he and Debbie are going to take some time off to breathe.

Erin Sullivan can be reached at esullivan@sptimes.com or 813 909-4609.

[Last modified September 15, 2007, 21:08:47]