The Pepperoni Roll Rush

Nov
19

Pepperoni rolls, West Virginia food of the gods.

I’ve written much about pepperoni rolls on this website. I’ve held many workshops in which I taught people how to make pepperoni rolls. I sell my own homemade pepperoni rolls at my Etsy shop. Pepperoni rolls are very popular and are one of my best selling items, and yet it still felt a bit extreme on Sunday when I suddenly started getting a slew of pepperoni roll orders. All at once. Five. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. All in the space of about three hours.

Hark, what kind of new spam is this? Spam or a scam, or someone is just messing with me! This was impossible! In around three hours, I had 44 orders for pepperoni rolls. That’s 44 dozen pepperoni rolls. In case you don’t have your calculator handy, that’s 528 pepperoni rolls.

I looked at the orders carefully. Different usernames, different shipping addresses. The orders were all paid. Spammers and scammers don’t want to give you money, they want to take it. But still. WHAT?! That’s so many orders, in such a short time span, and ALL for pepperoni rolls.

Being Thanksgiving week, the only day I can ship this week is Monday. I ship by priority mail and I have to have at least a two-day window to ship and have my baked goods arrive at their destination. I don’t ship over Sundays or holidays when the post office is closed for the sake of freshness. Monday was already booked with previously scheduled orders. It’s the holidays and my shop is very busy during the holidays.

When the onslaught of orders slowed down, I rescheduled all the orders for the following week since obviously I couldn’t do them all on Monday of this week and I can’t ship again until next Monday when I will have a full shipping week to ship Monday through Thursday. And apparently I will be making a lot of pepperoni rolls.

After sending out all the rescheduling notifications to customers, I heard back from several of them and then it all became clear when a couple of them mentioned they’d just watched a story on CBS Sunday Morning about the history of pepperoni rolls in West Virginia. I googled and found the story, which you can see here.

Wow. The power of TV. A national network runs a story on pepperoni rolls and within a few hours I have orders for 44 dozen pepperoni rolls. And it’s not like I’m even mentioned in the story! In fact, oddly, I discovered in the story that I’m not the West Virginia pepperoni roll expert–the story says that’s someone named Candace Nelson. Hmmpphhh!

I told Morgan about all this pepperoni roll madness and she said, “You’re rolling in the dough!” Ha.

Anyway, the holidays at my Etsy shop really started a couple of months ago. Orders have been ramping up since the fall and will go crazy here in the next month. Despite the 528 pepperoni rolls I have to make next week, I am still taking orders! (Could you order something besides pepperoni rolls? If not, that’s okay, I can make more! I’m just sayin’! I make a lot of other yummy stuff!!!!)

You can find the main page of my shop, and all the shop sections, here

You can find my pepperoni rolls here.

More food for parties and holidays here.

And lots of edible gift ideas (including monthly club gift subscriptions for scones, muffins, biscuits, assorted treats, fudge, and cookies) here.

Now who wants to cut up some pepperoni for me? Volunteers?

::crickets::

P.S. Actually, Rodney cuts up all the pepperoni sticks for me. And he hardly ever gets a pepperoni roll–the pepperoni rolls are always for somebody else!

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Posted by Suzanne McMinn | Permalink

Camper Makeover: The Auction

Sep
13

Ever thought about redoing a camper? For yourself, or to flip it? I’m gonna give you the numbers!

This is our 1984 13-foot Scotty camper.

This is what it looked like before.

This is how it looked after the remodel.

You can see all the “before” pictures here and all the demo pictures here and here. See the full makeover reveal post here.

So, how did this work out for us? We didn’t really want to use the camper. We are not campers. Rodney bought this camper maybe around 6-ish years ago. At that time, he paid $400 for the camper. The only time the camper was ever used was in his back yard when his son lived in it for about six months or so. We put the remodeled camper up for auction on eBay.

This is Aimee! The happy winner of the eBay auction. She came 3 1/2 hours from Ohio to pick up the camper yesterday.

Back to the numbers–

If you are a handy person and can do the work yourself, you can deduct the cost of labor. We hired a professional contractor to do the work for us. What did we do ourselves? We cleaned the camper inside and out, from power washing the exterior and recaulking to sealing the roof. Inside we supercleaned every inch of it. We also painted trim. And we shopped–a LOT. But we hired a contractor for all the heavy lifting on the interior remodel.

Along with purchasing new tires and roof coat and caulk outside, we bought all the new interior flooring and ceiling and wall materials. We bought a new sewer kit, a new fridge, new faucets for both the kitchen and bathroom, all new upholstery and foam, new thermostat, new wall decor and shelving, new trim, and a lot of paint, along with decorative items, and other stuff I’ve forgotten by now.

Numbers! We spent $2000 on all the materials and supplies and decor and tires, etc. We spent $1000 for a week’s contractor labor. The auction fees on eBay added up to $160, which made our total costs $3160. We sold the camper for $5300, which made a profit of $2140. If you count off the original $400 cost of the camper, that’s a profit of $1740, though we didn’t really consider the original $400 too much since that was long ago water under the bridge and the camper was used (at least by Rodney’s son) during that time. Either way you look at it, we made a nice little profit. So there’s how it worked out for us on our big fat camper flip. Got a camper? Want to try it?

So first, Rodney paid himself back the money he spent on the camper, and THEN. Today, we went shopping and bought a new 65-inch TV and a big new comfy couch with our camper flip profit. We don’t miss the camper a bit!

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Posted by Suzanne McMinn | Permalink