WALDOBORO, Maine — Dow Furniture co-owner Dana Dow is planning to purchase the former Science Source building in Waldoboro and with it aims to expand not only the business’s discount furniture showroom space but its customer reach as well.
“I’m buying it,” Dana Dow, a former legislator, said Jan. 8, referring to the industrial space located directly across Route 1 from Dow Furniture. He co-owns the business with his wife, Lisa Dow.
According to Dow, he and Rudy Graf, owner of the former Science Source property and building, have settled on a purchase price, and the sale is planned to close between Jan. 21 and Jan. 31.
Dow did not disclose the purchase price but said it was “fair market value.”
Graf built up the Science Source over 25 years, after he purchased it as Bond Manufacturing in 1986.
Graf sold the company in 2011, and it was resold to Florida-based Science First last summer. Science First quickly shuttered the Waldoboro facility and moved the company’s inventory and assets to Florida.
Graf did not immediately return a call for comment.
Dow is planning to move Dow Furniture’s bargain basement across the road, expanding it by an estimated four to five times, he said. Situated on 18 acres, the building covers roughly 18,000 square feet, he said.
The new discount center mostly will sell living room furniture but also will have bedroom and dining room furniture, Dow said. He is unsure whether mattresses will be offered in the discount center, but if so, it may be a selection of camp or cottage mattresses up into the medium grades, he said.
Dow assumes the business will need to add more staff by the time the discount center opens, which he hopes will be by late winter or early spring.
“I’m not going to renovate a heck of a lot inside. It’s a warehouse, and it looks like a warehouse, and I want to sell at warehouse prices,” Dow said. “I’m going to let it look like a warehouse. I don’t want people to have to pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars of renovation.
“Hopefully a lot of it will be self-delivery,” he continued. “That’ll be the best pricing.”
The plan of the expansion is to grow the company’s customer reach to span from Brunswick to Bucksport, Dow said.
“Most of our business is from Lincolnville to Wiscasset, so we’re trying to draw in a lot of business that may be going to Portland possibly — Portland, Augusta, Bangor, whatever,” he said.