Keeping the Home Fires Burning

I used to get giddy when the envelopes from Fidelity Investments and Vanguard Group arrived in the mail each month, informing us how much new wealth the magic stock market had bestowed upon us. I would contemplate the balance and think of what steel king Andrew Carnegie said the first time he received a stock dividend: "Eureka!"

Now, like much of the rest of the world, I can't even look. My wife, Polly, opens the envelopes, says nothing and sends them straight to the file cabinet. Dreams of early retirement have faded.

Goodbye, trip around the world. Hello, couch and clicker.

Judy Miller, 69, is in the same leaking boat.

A year and a half ago, Miller and business partner Margaret Laurenson, 63, were thinking of pulling back a bit after 30 years of running their Falls Church fireplace store, known as Woodburners Two. Maybe ratchet down the workload. Hire some managers to take over. Take a salary cut. Schedule some well-deserved travel.

Then you-know-what came along. Credit crisis. Recession. Stock market plunge. Call it whatever you want.

"We had different exit strategies that we were thinking about," said Miller, who said she has lost only 15 percent of her retirement and taxable savings. "One was to sell [the business]. Another was to cut back on hours and get managers to run it. I had saved a lot. I had a really conservative plan," administered by Merrill Lynch, no less! "And then this happened."

Sales of gas fireplaces, which were their bread and butter, declined with the drop in home building and remodeling. Overall monthly revenue fell 10 to 20 percent.

Now Woodburners is trying to stay alive long enough to ride the cycle back up. The owners hired a business consultant to help them save on costs, and they are rapidly implementing changes to stay cash-flow positive.

"We felt like we had to stay here and get through this tough time," Miller said. "I don't want to hand it over to someone who has to struggle."

Miller and Laurenson were neighbors in the 1970s and shopping for fireplaces in Manassas to help defray the ballooning costs of energy. The owner of the store, who distributed fireplace equipment to other stores, recommended that they get in the business.

"The guy made it sound like we should do this," Miller said. They researched the business by calling fireplace and wood stove makers up and down the East Coast. They borrowed $35,000 from Union Bank, putting up their homes as collateral. They bought some secondhand commercial furniture in the District and a new cash register in Baileys Crossroads. They talked to a friend in commercial real estate, found 1,200 feet of relatively inexpensive space on Wilson Boulevard in Arlington and paid two months' rent in advance. They begged a couple of manufacturers to sell them two stoves and drove Laurenson's family van to North Carolina and to Harrisonburg, Va., to pick them up. Later, more stoves arrived, sometimes in the middle of the night, and the women were in the shop ready to receive the deliveries.