VALDOSTA — After 43 years, Mary and Roy Rawlins, owners of Home of 10,000 Picture Frames, are ready to retire.

In the 1960s, Mary was teaching Spanish at Lowndes High School while Roy worked at Moody Air Force Base as a draftsman in the engineering department.

After the birth of their first child, they moved to Marietta so Roy could go to Southern Tech and get a degree in civil engineering.

While going to school, Roy worked part-time in a picture frame shop, House of 10,000 Picture Frames.

As graduation neared, Roy learned he would have to apprentice for a couple of years before he could actually become licensed as a civil engineer.

“I wanted to be out,” Roy said. “I was ready to do something.”

Roy met Steve Papevies while working at House of 10,000 Picture Frames.

The two of them worked together in Sandy Springs at a frame shop that opened the year before Roy graduated.

“We just did so good there,” Roy said. “I could not believe the amount of orders we took in. Steve and I saw how well the store was doing and we thought, you know, we could be doing this for ourselves.”

So Roy and Mary, along with Papevies and his family, moved to Valdosta. They opened Home of 10,000 Picture Frames on July 4, 1972. They opened in a building with no air-conditioning at 310 N. Ashley St.

They sweated out the first year, having a large window unit AC installed before the next summer.

A couple of years later, Papevies left the company and the Rawlinses bought him out.

They moved to 1909 N. Ashley St. where they stayed for about 13 years, before having a new store built at 2217 N. Ashley St.

Home of 10,000 Picture Frames was there for another 13 years before moving to a new location at Summit Pointe in 2001.

“Each time we moved to improve locations, to get a larger building,” Mary said.

Last year, they moved to Downtown Valdosta.

“We made the choice to move downtown because we thought that’s where the artistic possibilities were in Valdosta,” Mary said. “We’ve been very pleased with downtown. I think it’s on the cusp of becoming a really interesting place with all the new things that are popping up.”

Once they moved, they started thinking about retiring, an idea Mary had to coax Roy into.

But they needed to find a buyer.

“We had no idea how we were going to go about selling the place,” Mary said. “This is not something that is easy to sell.”

That’s when Melanie McGinnis came through the door.

McGinnis had worked with the Rawlinses at their Summit Pointe location.

Since, she moved to Rome and worked at a bank, in legal services and in customer service, but she had never found a job she loved as much as working with frames: designing the frame, cutting the wood, laying the whole thing out.

She walked into Home of 10,000 Picture Frames and asked if they needed a little part-time help.

“I was willing to work an hour a week for free if I had to,” McGinnis said. “I just wanted to do it again.”

“We said not only will we hire you, we’ll sell you the business,” Mary said.

Now, after nine months of paperwork and acquiring a Small Business Administration loan, McGinnis is ready.

She has plans to modernize the store a little, repainting it and adding track lighting.

Mary and Roy are ready to retire and travel a little, but they admit it’s hard to leave.

For Mary, her favorite part of the job has always been the customers.

“The people, by far,” Mary said. “I’ve been accused of being a talker and I develop relationships with customers. It’s a natural progression when you talk with people about their intimate family celebrations.

“You get to see people’s most intimate moments in life: when they have children, get married, when they retire. You get very connected to your customer because you share by photographs all the high points of their life. We’ve dealt with some people long enough that we’ve seen people have children, raise them up, and now their kids are having kids,” Mary said.

For Roy, it’s the challenge of unique projects that he’ll miss the most, whether framing prints that are 10 feet long or shadowboxing antique gynecological instruments for a doctor’s office or learning photo restoration on Photoshop.

“You’ve got to partly be a designer, partly a decorator and a little bit of a carpenter and a little bit of everything else, too,” Roy said.

“When you’ve been opening the doors for 43 years, it’s hard to think about not doing that anymore. It’s going to take some practice. It’s a daunting thought to think I’m not going to have anything to do when I wake up in the morning,” Mary said.

Then she started laughing.

“But I’m willing to try and work that out. I’m willing to give it a shot.”

Stuart Taylor is a reporter for the Valdosta Daily Times.