Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we give our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems.)
I’ve got a thing for hardware stores.
Not the big-box behemoths like Home Depot or Lowe’s, necessarily (although those can be pretty great, too).
The ones I prefer smell of sawdust and fertilizer and have those cramped aisles chock-full of products you don’t know you needed until you have to replace them.
Like my local Ace Hardware, which has been my mainstay since I moved here in the early 1990s (it opened in 1977). Or like McGuckin’s in Boulder or the now-shuttered Meyer Hardware in Golden, wonderful places with rows of well-used shelves holding tools and gardening supplies and building materials and assorted geegaws that all inspire a sense of wonder and possibility.
When I was a little girl, my dad would take me down to Kos Hardware, a tiny, ramshackle storefront with yellow peeling paint and untold mysteries within. The proprietor, Mr. Kos (did he even have a first name?), would come to greet us from behind the front counter in well-worn denim overalls and most always had what Dad needed.
My job was to count out penny nails — there were millions of them, it seemed, in small bins on a heavy-duty rotating rack — and plop them into a tiny paper bag while Dad went off with the proprietor into the bowels of that crowded, dusty little shop in search of what he actually came for.
We paid with cash, and there was always a piece of candy or two for kids at the checkout counter.
And then we would go home, where Dad would head into the garden to plant those new seeds or down into his basement workshop that also smelled of sawdust and held a giant table saw, a wall of mismatched tools on a pegboard, nails and screws in assorted old coffee cans, pieces of scrap wood and old storm windows.
It was in there that Dad built three little one-piece desks with connected chairs using a plan out of The Practical Handyman’s Encyclopedia. (I still have his 22-book set, and it was fate or chance that when I went to send my sisters a photo of one of them last week and flipped through it, Dad’s spirit hand stopped the page right at the pattern for the little desks. Can’t make that up.)
Each was a different size, one a bit larger than the next, for each of us. He had painted them gray, and accented in blue, yellow and green, and presented them, all in a row, to his three daughters one Christmas.
I still have mine with the original (probably lead) paint, and treasure it as much as I do the memories of Dad’s workshop. (Long gone are his other projects, like the standup bowling lane, the seesaw, the Adirondack chairs and the oversized sawhorses we used for to support a play tent.)
Colorado Ace Hardware stores are franchised and locally owned. Its jingle: “Ace is the place with the helpful hardware folks” (you will be singing that to yourself for a while; you are welcome). The one on East 12th Avenue in Congress Park is my go-to, with walls jam-packed with products and a wall of screws and nails and nuts and bolts that will leave you awestruck. The best part: The clerks there know how to find stuff.
“I’ve been working here for about a year and am always surprised by what else we carry,” said clerk Michael Leggett. “On a daily basis, I look and think, ‘Oh, where did you come from?'”
Employees can pretty quickly put their hands on a replacement for that obscure little part, cut you a new pane of glass for that broken picture frame, or point you to the washers for that leaky garden hose.
Or help you find the materials to build your kids little matching desks.
