The Grand Opening of Havenleigh Kitchen & Stillroom: Wins, Blunders, and Why This Week Changed Everything

There are weeks that mark something.

Not because everything went perfectly - this one certainly didn't - but because something that lived only in your mind for years finally existed in the world. This was that week. The grand opening of Havenleigh Kitchen & Stillroom.

I need to say that plainly before I get into anything else, because the blunders were real and I'm going to tell you as many as I can remember. But the blunders exist inside a much larger thing, and I don't want to lose sight of that.

Years — Decades — in the Making

This is not a business I decided to start last year.

The philosophy behind HKS has been building for the better part of my adult life. The sourdough practice, the stillroom preparations, the deep conviction that what we put in and on our bodies matters enormously - that has been my education, my obsession, my slow and deliberate work for years. What changed recently is that I finally found a way to share it that feels right. Not squeezed into someone else's model of what a business should look like. Not scaled beyond what my nervous system can sustain. Not built for someone else's approval.

Built for this community. Built at my pace. Built around what I actually believe.

That is a bigger deal than it might sound. I spent a long time not knowing how to participate in the world in a way that felt honest. Finding that way - and then actually doing it - is the win underneath all the other wins.

What It Took to Get Here

I write about mental health in this space because it is not separate from this business. It is the foundation of it.

When I moved to Tucson in August of 2021, I was a few years into a profound personal reckoning. I had stopped drinking - which sounds straightforward until you understand what alcohol had been doing for fifteen-plus years. It had been the thing that quieted the noise. The all-consuming negative thought loops, the anxiety, the inability to be still. A drink provided a window of relief from all of that. Without it, I was left with everything I had been managing around.

What followed was a long, hard season. Severe depression. Complete isolation - from everyone, in every direction. Long periods of total shutdown. I moved to a new city and largely disappeared inside myself for stretches of time that felt endless.

But I knew why I was going through it. I knew that on the other side of it was something real. So I worked. I studied gut health, sound healing, Reiki, Ayurvedic principles, trauma therapy, plant medicine. I printed affirmations and put them next to my bed and said them before I opened my eyes each morning until they stopped feeling foreign. I built rituals - to ground, to pray, to meditate - and I kept them even when they felt hollow. I learned, slowly and through a lot of trial, how to regulate my own nervous system without reaching for something outside myself.

That work is why HKS exists in the form it does. Intentionally small. Genuinely slow. Designed to grow only as fast as my foundation can hold.

Leading up to this week, I felt calm in a way I haven't always been able to access. There were moments of being whelmed - not overwhelmed, just whelmed. My heart rate stayed steady. I got it done.

That is a big deal.

The Blunders

I promised honesty, so here it is.

On day one, the pizza dough was improperly refrigerated. It wasn't in the right conditions overnight and couldn't go out. In hindsight, this was an early warning sign of what was coming on day two.

The tent situation. A few hours before opening up, my brand-new pop-up tent caught a wind gust and went airborne down the driveway. I was home alone. I dragged it back to the spot, got through the day, but the tent did need some resuscitation.

No cash box. I had assumed people would pay digitally. Some did not. We found change in the house, improvised, and handled it. To be very honest, I was prepared for this to be a faceless pickup, but it was so nice talking to everyone! I'm so glad I did.

No card reader set up for tap payment. Same assumption, same lesson. When you assume, as the saying goes, you make an a$$ of yourself and of me.

Forgot the display pieces on day one. The antique cabinet meant to display the stillroom products and the butcher blocks for the display sat inside while I ran the pop-up without them. Not a huge blunder. But for me, I was disappointed.

Day two was a full loss. While I slept, the refrigerator we had designated specifically for bakery use decided to stop working. All eighteen loaves overproofed overnight and were not salvageable for sale. I made the call not to open that day. It was the right call, and it was still a hard one to make.

18 overproofed loaves

Day three, the local grain loaves stuck. Six out of eight loaves stuck to the pans during the first steam bake, ruining the rise. A technical problem I'm working through.

My upper back. This one isn't a blunder so much as a signal I'm taking seriously. A sharp, burning pain starting in my upper-back and tingling up toward my neck. I got an emergency massage Friday evening. Sunday morning I had Reiki done. Monday, I will work on myself with Emotion Code. I'll be seeing my chiropractor, Dr. Ram, soon. I'm watching it. I suspect it may be my boots - the ones I adore - but time will tell.

The Wins

Now. Here is what actually happened this week.

1. The very first customer on day one was a stranger who happened to be driving by. It happened to be her birthday. She was happy to have found us, and I was relieved... genuinely relieved - that the first person to walk up was kind and joyful and completely unplanned. Something about that made the whole thing feel real in a way that nothing I had done in preparation had managed to.

2. Neighbors stopped by - including our direct neighbors, people we had lived near this entire time without ever meeting. That matters. That is exactly what this is for.

3. I sold stillroom products that I have been making and using and trusting for years. Putting them into someone else's hands for the first time was something I had been working toward for longer than I can easily explain.

4. And the thing I am most proud of: a block gathering is planned for this Friday in front of the pop-up. Neighbors are bringing chairs, snacks, and drinks. People who were strangers a week ago are coming together in the way neighbors used to, in the way I believe they still can. That is the precise thing I was trying to build when I started this.

What I'm Taking Into Next Week

The refrigerator will be dealt with. The tent will be replaced. The dough workflow will be adjusted. My back will be cared for with the same attention I give everything else.

But something else happened this weekend that I want to name.

I spent most of it in bed, resting my back. And instead of being swallowed by anxiety about whether my body would hold up another week, I found myself doing something I don't always give myself permission to do... reflecting with genuine pride on what I had just accomplished.

I built another business. One more to add to a resume that spans twenty years and dozens of full digital builds... brands, websites, collateral, copy, presence - for businesses of every size. I have done this so many times, across so many industries, that I sometimes forget it is not ordinary. I have been doing it since before a digital footprint was even a concept. It has always felt less like work and more like the thing my brain was made for. There is a particular kind of magic in taking something that exists only as an idea and making it visible, functional, real.

What opening HKS proved to me is that I am not just recovering from the years of burnout that preceded this. I am back. Fully. And being back means being honest about where my energy actually wants to go, which has always been toward building new things, giving them shape, bringing them to life.

There is more to that thought that I will share when the time is right and in the right place. For now, what it means for HKS is this: I am moving forward with Friday openings only. When I started with Wednesday through Friday, I knew those first two weeks were meant to show me what would actually work inside my home and my life. They did exactly that. One day a week, pre-orders guaranteed, with the space to bring more creativity and more intention to what I offer my neighbors, rather than spreading it thin across three days.

This is my business. One of my creative outlets. Built around what works for me... and because of that, I'm building to last as long as I am here.

The foundation held this week. Not perfectly, but it held. And that is enough to keep building on.

Here's to next week's wins and lessons.

🥂 Audra

---

Havenleigh Kitchen & Stillroom is a small-batch cottage bakery and traditional stillroom in Northwest Tucson, Arizona. Pre-orders are available through Hotplate. Pickup is from our front porch pop-up.