By Jessica Hoover
Second Stories, co-owned by mother-daughter duo Angie Cornelius and Aimee Ector, is not your ordinary antique store. Opened Aug. 12, the store has a variety of items that are old, new and renewed. According to Cornelius, the name Second Stories is derived from her and her daughter’s love of renovating old items. She said it gives the items a second story and a second life.
“Say we find three chairs,” Cornelius said. “There used to be four but now there’s three. Nobody wants to buy three chairs, but we do. We find all this old stuff. When there’s not anything wrong with it, it just needs love. So we bring it completely back to life. We’ll take an old sewing machine cabinet and turn it into a desk, a table.”
To find old items to renovate, Cornelius and Ector visit flea markets, garage sales, auctions and even find items on the side of the road. According to Ector, searching for items is something they have always enjoyed doing together.
“We’ve always loved finding antiques and vintage items when I was little,” Ector said. “We’ve always done that together. It’s one of the things that we really enjoy spending time together and doing.”
Ector and Cornelius’ passion for finding antiques eventually turned into buying an old building to open Second Stories. To prepare the building, they tore open the floors but kept the original wood, which was more than 100 years old. They also repainted the inside and parts of the outside, with more renovations to come.
In addition to renovating items, Cornelius and Ector also rent spaces for vendors and sell people’s items for a percentage of the profit. Cornelius said their vision for Second Stories is for it to be unique.
“We have diversity,” Cornelius said. “We have that charm and the happiness that we want people to feel when they walk in. We don’t want people to come in and go, ‘Oh, it’s an antique store, and the walls are painted black. It’s dark.’ We wanted something different. We wanted bright and cheery and happy. We wanted people to linger and look at all of the things.”
Cornelius worked with the City of Fishers until retirement, and Ector works with the City of Fishers.
