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Hayden — Three years ago, ankle deep in water that had collected on the concrete floor of a side-street Hayden warehouse, Robyn Boeckmann and Gerard Cina could only see a New York-style deli complete with the smell of hanging meat and the sound of folding butcher paper. Today, those smells and sounds are real, and Full Belly Deli owners Boeckmann and Cina are ready to sell their start-up business and move on to a new venture.

Cina and Boeckmann, both New Yorkers, moved to Hayden and built the shop -- their dream -- one dollar at a time.

"If you've ever been to the East Coast, you know that on every corner there is a deli, and you know that smell," Cina said. "If you weren't hungry when you went in, you would be. I was inspired by those places."

Cina grew up in a small, heavily Italian town in upstate New York -- the kind of place where every last name ended in a vowel, he said. "There is an ethnic influence that doesn't really exist here," he said.

Cina is a large, somewhat intimidating man with the calloused hands of a construction worker and the white apron and New York accent of an old-world deli owner.

He and Boeckmann met in New York 10 years ago. Six months before they met, Cina visited Routt County on a 10-day archery elk hunt and had his mind set on moving.

Six months later, New York was 2,000 miles away and Cina had a job with Fox Construction.

Boeckmann was a post office employee in New York. She supervised the sorting floor, overseeing machines that flipped through more than a million pieces of mail a day. When she walked into the Steamboat Springs post office and saw workers sorting by hand, she decided to take a job as a housekeeper instead, then a job cooking for a hunting outfitter.

The years flew buy and the couple explored the Rockies.

"We didn't pick destinations," Cina said. "We picked directions."

They were looking for rural property to keep horses, and a place to start a business.

"We looked as far as Vail," Cina said, "but we like the community in Hayden and the prices were right."

Three years ago, they bought the building at 168 Walnut St. for $45,000.

The building is a half block off busy U.S. 40 and most of the buildings around it were used for storage, Cina said, but the couple didn't mind taking a risk.

"If the food is good, you don't mind going out of your way for it," he said.

There was no heat, electricity or water in the building, and "when it rained outside, it rained inside," Boeckmann said.

Their goal in opening a deli was to build and open the business out of pocket without a lot of debt.

It took over a year to put in the plumbing, electricity, the heating and air conditioning and install a kitchen while working other jobs.

Town residents watched and waited.

168 Walnut St. was built in 1905. It housed the original county jail and then became a meat packing plant, Boggs Hardware, a grocery store and an auto parts store.

In the summer, when Hayden High School hosts class reunions, people stop into the deli to share their memories.

"One guy showed me the scar on his hand from a cut he got at the meat packing plant," Cina said.

On opening day, the line ran from the counter out the door.

"Everyone in town showed up," Boeckmann said. "The first week we were slammed to the wall. Since then, business has leveled to steady confusion."

Full Belly Deli is open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Saturday. It serves grab-and-go breakfast sandwiches and has a regular crowd of sit-down bacon-and-eggs morning customers. Coffee is always on the house.

At lunch, Full Belly serves hot or cold deli sandwiches, half-pound "hand spanked" hamburgers, pizza, stromboli and dinner customers can call ahead for pasta dishes.

Now that the deli has a strong base of customers and the building looks years away from its watery warehouse beginnings, the couple is ready to sell.

The business comes with the real estate, including a one-bedroom apartment in back, for $225,000.

"We started on a shoestring with no capital behind us," Cina said. "We worked flat out for three years. It's not the best way to do it, but it made us work harder."