(You can read more about the fire and the weeks directly following in this blog.)
In August 2025, a fire in the restaurant next door forced us to rebuild our bookstore – basically taking us back to the very beginning. The building was saved, but everything had to be taken down to the studs to get rid of smoke and water damage – even some of those studs were ripped out along the way. It's been a difficult season. Lots of missed deadlines, unending stress, surprise moments of grief, and hoping that "next week will be a big one".
I've been snapping photos along the way because its the best way I know to tell a story:
Back to the beginning
Since we opened 18 months ago, we've been taking a selfie to mark major milestones. We used to laugh and say "look how tired we were on opening day!"
We are still tired.
August 13
We were so proud of how the store was looking after almost 2 years of hard work. I brought my camera to the store the day before the fire to snap some photos for instagram.
August 14
In the early morning of August 14, an electrical fire started at The Torreador restaurant next door. Luckily, a patrolman drove past shortly after, saw the smoke and fire, and called the fire department. They were able to put the fire out quickly, saving our building that has stood since the 1950’s.
(Photo courtesy of Johnson County Post)
August 22
Thankfully, flames never reached our side of the building. But because of smoke and water damage, every bit of our inventory was ruined. Kate, Laramie, and the team spent 2 weeks cleaning out the store and recording every item for insurance. Thousands and thousands of products make for a terrifying (and very sad) spreadsheet.
August 28
After clearing out inventory, we still had to get our furniture out for the restoration of the building. Insurance adjusters and several others told us it "wasn't worth it' to save the furniture. We took almost everything and filled our garage top-to-bottom. Soon even the garage was full, so we set up a tent on the back patio to protect what we could. The process of fumigating, cleaning, and refinishing all of this took several months.
August 29
We love our Laramie ❤️
Laramie is our store manager and only full-time employee. Since the fire, she has been working hard every day fulfilling orders, organizing inventory, and everything in between. She has worked from our kitchen counter, spare bedroom, and her Toyota while she hand-delivers books around KC. If you received a package in the mail from Monstera's, it was probably Laramie who dropped it off at the post office.
We couldn't have done it without her. Thanks, Laramie.
September 3
Thanks to the guy who installed our wi-fi, we learned you can buy an o-zone machine online that pulls the smell out of smelly things. His friend had used one, he said, and "this guy smokes a lot of weed and he used it to get the smell from his car and it works pretty good. That's what I would recommend."
This is actually what the restoration companies do, so we bought our own mini-ozone machine and used it in the garage to remove the smoke smell from everything that survived the fire.
September 5
Kate and Laramie receive the first replacement orders in our kitchen. My friend, Harvey, bought this cart for us at a garage sale because he knew we would be needing it.
September 6
Insurance eventually reimbursed us for lost inventory, but that process takes several months. To bridge the gap, we hosted pop-ups outside the store for 6 weeks. Thank you all for being so supportive! It was great to see everyone and it helped us stay afloat.
September 6
During the first few pop-ups, several friends from our book clubs hosted a bake sale for shoppers. These same people helped us clean bookshelves and carts and furniture along the way. Thanks, friends. 🥰
September 6
To replace our used book inventory, we put out an SOS to the community and you brought some amazing donations! Some of my favorite moments were noticing a familiar name inside the cover of a donated book. So many generous people helped out and we are very grateful.
September 8
Tony, from Trabon Printing, offered to print our bookmarks for free. He dropped an entire box on our front porch so we had bookmarks to give away at pop-ups. ❤️
(Bookmark designs by Amy Smarsh Johnson, Amber Goodvin, and myself)
September 13
6:14am. When setting up for Saturday popups, the first trip happened before the sun came up.
Each popup took several hours of prep on Friday, 2 hours to set up in the morning and 3 hours to pack up afterward.
September 15
After several weeks of negotiations between our landlord and the restoration company, they told us we could not keep our built-in bookshelves in the space. By this time, our garage, driveway, and back patio were full of furniture.
We ended up paying a 3rd-party company to refinish and store them until we could move back in.
We built these shelves inside the store, so some had to be taken apart just to get out the front door.
September 21
Our first event after the fire was "PuzzleRama!", a partnership with our neighbors at BrewLab!
100 people showed up on a Sunday afternoon for the team puzzle competition. It was a blast to see so many friends and families having good old-fashioned fun. The winning team finished their 500-piece puzzle in 35 minutes!
September 25
We kept the plant classes rolling with a kokedama class at the historic Campbell Dome House! It's a beautiful space and the hosts (friends from our kids' school) were so kind and generous to let us use it.
September 26
Packing up after the first night of the Overland Park Fall Festival. This is a 2-day event, and our neighbors across the street, Home Holistic, let us store everything in their building overnight so we didn't have to pack it home and back the next morning.
By the end of September, the weather was getting colder and we were exhausted. We had been promised that construction would be starting quickly at that point, so we decided this would be the last popup and we shifted into "re-open mode."
October 3
Throughout October, we slowly made progress on cleaning furniture so that it was ready to move back into the bookstore. We burned through stacks and stacks of these Smoke & Soot Erasers to remove soot and stains – it worked on everything from our checkout counter to trucker hats.
October 8
The day after the fire, we brought home all of the plants from the building and put them on our deck, hoping the rain and sun could save them. With help from family members, we wiped every plant to remove the soot and trimmed off dead and damaged leaves. Nearly every plant that we brought home bounced back and was thriving by October.
October 8
We didn't have enough room in our home for all of the plants, so several friends offered to give them loving foster homes until we re-opened.
October 9
We set up as vendors for several events throughout October, which was helpful to keep momentum while we waited for repairs on the building.
Our team popped-up at the Heartland Book Fest, JoCo Library Writers Conference, The KC Women Leaders in Sports conference, and Chicken N Pickle's "Stems & Stories."
October 11
After a long day at the Heartland Book Festival we were walking through the basement of the downtown library, carting dozens of book boxes back to the car. We stepped out onto the sidewalk and found Taylor Jenkins Reid (far left) waiting for her ride.
TJR, Kate's favorite author, had been a speaker at the event but we were set up on a different floor and weren't able to watch any of the sessions.
Taylor said, "I heard about your store... are you guys really selling books out of your basement?!"
October 12
After a few weeks of demo, our shop was down to the bare studs and ready for cleaning and fire restoration.
October 20
The restoration crews use industrial air cleansers and then cover all the surfaces with white paint to seal in whatever smoke smell is left. During this phase, we also suffered multiple delays on the permits and architectural drawings.
October 23
At the end of October, our full team came back to work to help label more than 5,000 titles. Talk about a full house – this was peak "working from home".
November 12
Feeling so close to the finish line and seeing significant progress, we hit another delay – the wall separating the bookstore and restaurant was not fire-rated, so the landlord elected to tear it down and rebuild it two weeks before Thanksgiving.
November 15
We had the PERFECT weather in mid-November so the whole family spent the weekend outside, putting the finishing touches on our checkout counter and display tables.
(New sidewalk sign painted by friend of the shop, Afton Lin!)
November 20
We'd been constantly frustrated for several weeks, but seeing our iconic checkered floor installed felt very symbolic. By this point, we were only 1 week away from Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and the KC Bookstore Crawl... so the stress and anxiety was intense as we waited for each inspection and progress update.
November 20
We had been prepared to move back into the store on November 3, so by mid-November our entire replacement order had been delivered... to our house. You wouldn't believe how great it felt to have our house back after we loaded up the U-Haul.
November 24
The morning we passed our final inspection, our refinished bookshelves were delivered. We had 4 days to move in and be open for Black Friday... one of those days being Thanksgiving.
November 24
The move-in crew! We had a group of all ages rolling books in, assembling furniture, and stocking shelves. We made a lot of progress that first day and were grateful for our bookstore family 💚