Local Factory Sold

I haven't been blogging much lately. As I continue to complete tasks for the house and learn about all the things that I was so blissfully ignorant of for the first 30+ years of my life (calcimine paint, picture rail, asbestos shingles, double hung windows, lathe and plaster, etc.), all those topics that originally seemed fodder for a posting are now commonplace. I don't blog about them for the same reason I don't blog about changing the oil in the car or mowing the lawn. They are just part of every day life. But events still occur which are newsworthy.

After hearing rumors swirling for several weeks, I finally got confirmation - the nearby factory has been sold. When we bought our house in 2007, it employed 600 people, and then by the end of 2008, it shut down. Since then the parent company has been trying to sell it with one caveat - they would not sell it to someone who could use it to manufacture the same product.

Imagine that there's a factory that is custom designed to make widgets. Widget Inc. decides to close it and won't sell it to anyone else who makes widgets. Being highly specialized, it is difficult to convert the factory into making anything else. Its not surprising that it took this long for the factory to be sold. What really surprised me was who it was sold to.

It was sold to a Canadian metal recycling company who specializes in the demolition and recycling of building sites. There's no official word on what happens next, but if I was a betting man, I'd say the days of the factory are numbered.