Two friends had a hunch: old houses and lunch
Risk pays off for an enterprising duo as talented with a bread knife as a putty knife
By the time you read this, the wooden sign over the door on Ferguson near King William will probably be gone. The company was Lunch-Bags.ca.
Sure, sandwiches often come in bags. But the thing is, the sandwiches here were made by a couple of bags. Yes, the LunchBags name was a little inside joke. Ellen Irving and Deborah Tompkins loved it.
They’re 50-somethings, and not old bags at all. But they both have a wicked sense of humour, something that helped them through an adventure that started 10 years ago.
That’s when the pair bought an old house as an investment.
“It was in rough shape, but had good bones,” Deborah says. “Kind of like us,” Ellen says. Deborah, mother of two, had found herself a single parent. She was working in marketing but figured if she ever wanted to retire, there would need to be more money coming in.
Why not invest in an old house, fix it up, collect some rent? She couldn’t do it on her own, so talked to friend Ellen, mother of five.
The two had known each other
since their days on the St. Clair Community Council, when they were neighbours on Gladstone. They hit it off in every way.
“I needed a short friend,” says Ellen, five-foot-10.
“I needed a tall one,” says Deborah, five-foot-one.
Ellen is a painter, local landscapes a specialty. You can find her work at the Hamilton Store on James North. But she figured she’d have time to help Deborah fix up an old house.
They got that first place, a duplex on Catharine North, 10 years ago for $139,000. They scraped paint, pulled off wallpaper, sanded floors, made more than one plumbing mistake, and the job was done. A year later they bought a converted Victorian on Mary near Cannon for $145,000 and renovated it, too.
Things were going well. But Deborah got downsized out of her job. In your 50s, it’s not easy to find another one.
In her work, she had sometimes been responsible for setting up meeting lunches. And it was often hard to find what she needed. So she sprang the LunchBags idea on Ellen.
“Hey, we’re both mothers,” she told her. “We’ve made lunches all our lives.”
They found a flat-topped building at 73 Ferguson North that had been some kind of call centre, maybe for frozen meats. There were phone jacks everywhere. The place was empty, and Deborah and Ellen got it for $140,000.
They walled off the back half of the building and rented that portion to a musical group.
In the front half, in late 2011, they started making healthy, fresh sandwiches and salads. And for dessert, Auntie Kay’s peanut butter cookies.
Packaging was important. They would use no plastic, just compostable materials. Utensils, for instance, were made of sugar cane or corn starch. Sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper.
It took time to build up the business. For a couple of years, they drew no salary. But customers did come on board — banks, police, the city, funeral homes. Ellen and Deborah did the deliveries themselves.
They had chosen a street with all manner of characters. The pair made it more interesting yet by installing one of the city’s first examples of a Little Free Library. It’s been knocked about over the years. And the other day, someone deposited waffles and syrup in there. Ellen and Deborah never gave up on the gesture.
But one year ago, they did accept an offer on the building and have stayed on as tenants until just now. The new owner is a doctor who may open a clinic of some kind there. He paid $369,000, and Ellen and Deborah used the substantial gain to pay off the mortgages on their other two investment properties. Retirement is now secure.
A lesson in all this? Go for it, Deborah says. “Don’t be afraid.”