Mark Barnes, owner of National Furniture Store Inc. here, is looking towards the heavens with his new marketing effort—displaying the store's name and longtime "No Baloney" slogan on its rooftop in hopes of grabbing attention from airline travelers and users of satellite image-mapping software.

Barnes and his son, Tyler, took a few days this fall to paint, using a special black coating, the National Furniture name and slogan on the store's white Elastomeric painted roof, Mark Barnes says. He says he wants the store, located just north of downtown at 1230 N. Division, to be seen from the sky and space.

"I was aiming for air traffic coming in from overhead, and for Google Earth," which offers satellite images to Internet users, Barnes says. "It's kind of a small target market."

So far, no customers have reported seeing his new paintings, but he's not discouraged. "No word yet," Barnes says. "Mostly, now when I go up there it just makes me laugh. It makes me laugh thinking about it now."

Barnes says he got the idea to do the painting when he flew into another city's airport and saw that a business had done it.

"I think it was Seattle or San Francisco," he recalls.

It took three full days of painting, and a material cost of $200, to complete the work, which was done in October at his store, he says.

The word "National" is painted above the word "Furniture," and each word measures 14 feet high by 65 feet wide, Barnes says.

"No Baloney" is oriented so it's perpendicular to the store name. Those two words measure 12 feet high and 70 feet long, he says.

He hasn't heard of another business doing such a paint job in the Spokane area.

"We could be hired," he quips.

National Furniture occupies a 22,000-square-foot, single-story building, and employs 13 people.