Leslie Stansbury, owner of Grrs ‘n’ Purrs Grooming Inc., plans to make her current location her last.

Stansbury and her husband, Dan Stansbury, recently developed an 1,800-square-foot building at 212 W. South in Deer Park to house the 25-year-old pet grooming business. It’s the business’s fifth location since Leslie Stansbury started it.

Grrs ‘n’ Purrs has a staff of five employees, including Stansbury. Grrs ‘n’ Purrs staff moved into the new building after Thanksgiving, following groundbreaking in August.

“That’s it. I’m not doing it again,” Stansbury says emphatically of moving again.

Gallery 12 Designs Inc., of Spokane, was the project architect and Mill Valley Homes Inc., also of Spokane, was the general contractor. The building cost $210,000 to construct, and she and her husband previously owned the plot on which it was built.

“What I enjoyed about working with Gallery 12 and Mill Valley was that they listened to our input and helped us create a facility with the animals in mind,” Stansbury says.

Stansbury says the business needed a facility to better serve its customers with larger dogs and a more segregated area for cat grooming.

“We service a very large area here, and being more spread out, the trend around here is for people to have bigger dogs, so we wanted to better accommodate their needs,” she says.

Stansbury adds, “Contrary to popular belief, cats initiate intimidation toward dogs and not the other way around. Obviously, it can create tension, so we took that into consideration when meeting with the designer and contractor.”

Having access to more space also has enabled staff to provide improved care for older dogs and service dogs, Stansbury says.

Grrs ‘n’ Purrs also installed a nonrestraint drying system for cats, which Stansbury says makes drying felines easier and more comfortable because they don’t have to be strapped so intensely in order to dry.

She says she knows of only one or two other such drying systems for cats in the Spokane and Deer Park area.

Prior to construction of the new facility, Grrs ‘n’ Purrs was located at 113 W. Crawford. Stansbury has built a client base of more than 2,000 customers since she started the business. She says she originally began pet grooming as a way to pay for college.

“It became very lucrative, and I just decided to keep on going with it,” she says.