Spokane carpet and flooring retailer and installer Carpet Barn is planning to open a second location in March in a 6,000-square-foot leased space at 10425 N. Newport Highway, in the Ashley Furniture building, says co-owner Dean Culp. 

Culp, who owns Carpet Barn with his wife Christina, says the new space will have a hallway linking it to an Ashley Furniture store, so customers can walk between the businesses. The space formerly was occupied by mattress retailer Sleep City, he says. 

Carpet Barn, which operates under the corporate entity Gunryn Inc., currently operates a store in a 15,000-square-foot building at 3527 E. Sprague, Culp says, and has eight employees. The new location will have at least four employees, he says. 

Culp purchased the business in December 2012 after the original owners, Tom and Heike Pardun, decided to retire, he says. The Parduns started the business about 25 years ago.

Carpet Barn is a full-service flooring retailer and installation business, Culp says. It sells carpet, vinyl, and laminate flooring, as well as hardwood floors and engineered hardwood floors, he says. 

“We do pretty much everything that goes on your floor, except for concrete installations,” he says. 

Culp decided to open the North Side location to serve the outlying communities there better, he says. 

“Our research indicated that a certain percentage of our business comes from that area, and there’s nothing like Carpet Barn on the North Side,” he asserts. 

Culp says the carpet industry has rebounded somewhat recently. 

“The flooring industry is typically in lockstep with the local economy and housing market, and we’ve seen a bit of a recovery over the last few years,” he says. “We expect that trend to continue, and to that end, we feel a North Side location will be better able to serve our customers there.”

For now, Culp doesn’t have any further plans for expansion after the North Side store opens, he says. 

“We’d like to get up north and see how things go,” he says. 

Carpet Barn doesn’t have any locations outside Spokane, Culp says, and isn’t a franchise. 

“There are other Carpet Barns in other states, but they’re not affiliated with us,” he says. 

Culp, whose background is in real estate and appraisals, also owns a small property management business with his wife called Gunryn Properties, he says. Before buying Carpet Barn, Culp owned an appraisal business called Pinnacle Appraisement Group, which he sold to one of his employees in 2006, he says. 

“My plan was, I was going to build apartments, but we all know what happened in 2007,” Culp says. “So in 2010, I started looking for a business to buy, because I thought some of these baby boomers who built these great businesses might like to retire.”

Culp says he had been buying flooring from Tom Pardun for some time before he purchased the business. 

“The former owner (of Carpet Barn) had been after me for a while to buy it, so I said, ‘Let’s take a look,’ and here we are,” Culp says.