BUCKHANNON – Dr. Kevin Conde has officially handed the reins to a new Dr. Conde and set up a new location.

Dr. Kevin Conde celebrated his retirement and the opening of his daughter’s new dentist’s office, Conde Family Dental Friday, Oct. 11, at 266 Route 20 South Road.

Dr. Margaret Conde said the event was a bittersweet moment in time and that she would miss working with her father.

“We are celebrating my dad’s retirement,” she said. “He started practicing in 1983, and he would have retired – probably six or seven years ago – but that was exactly when I decided I wanted to be a dentist.”

“He’s always been an awesome dentist, and I’m so lucky to have him,” Conde said of her father. “He didn’t only wait for me to graduate; he also waited for me to open my own office, and he wanted to be part of the transition. I am so happy for him that he finally gets to do this, but I’m also sad, and I’m going to miss seeing him around because he was always sunshine on a bad day.”

Conde wanted to be an artist, but she decided that path wasn’t right for her, so she began taking biochemistry classes at school to look at new fields.

“I was all over the map,” she said. “I did a little bit of freelance art, and I still had no clue what I wanted to do, so I started to work in my dad’s office, which I worked in casually since I was about 16,” Conde said. “I was just assisting and working the front desk, and I’d never been chairside with the doctor, so I was watching him one day, and it just hit me like a brick. I felt stupid because I spent all that time trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and it was sitting there in front of me the whole time.”

Conde discovered dentistry was its own art form and like a puzzle.

“There is some art to it, especially when you do front teeth, you’re helping someone build something that makes them happy and makes them feel pretty, so it fits a lot of my artistic desires,” Conde said. “It had more routine and less unreliability, like the pioneering nature of an artist.”

Once Conde joined the business, she decided to venture out on her own – but at a new location.

“He’s always worked with a partner; first, Dr. Johns and then my dad partnered with Dr. Malone when Dr. Johns left, so I came in as the fourth partner, and I just wanted to do things my way,” Conde said. “When there’s that many tracks already laid down, it’s hard to get your own, so it was an amicable separation. I wanted to start my own thing, so we looked for buildings in Buckhannon, and this one was perfect.”

Conde partnered with her brother-in-law, Kyle Nuttall, to renovate the space, and now his law office, Nuttall Legal, LLC, is right next door.

“We took off together, and we have all been working on it,” Conde said. “My mom helps manage, my sister manages, so it’s been an adventure. When I was a kid, this used to be a movie store, so I remember walking around, picking up movies and now it’s my dental office – it’s so surreal, it doesn’t really feel real.”

Owner of Nuttall Legal and an attorney, Nuttall said it was important to find a space that would make people comfortable for his business and Conde’s.

“It’s important that people feel comfortable, especially for lawyers; for some reason, lawyers intimidate people, and that’s true for dentists as well,” Nuttall said. “People are scared of going to the dentist because they might have had bad experiences, but they really shouldn’t worry too much about here, both Kevin and Maggie are very, very good at what they do.”

Nuttall partnered with Conde on the new building and its renovation because he was already looking for a new space.

“I’ve been needing nicer space and more space for a while,” he said. “We were downtown –

directly across from Daya Wright’s office – and I initially started out using just the downstairs, and then I rented out the upstairs part of that too.

“I wanted more space to add more people, and my wife is starting to do all the online stuff, all the Facebook marketing and things like that for myself and for the Condes, so having a space where she can work has been great, Nuttall added.

Nuttall now primarily focuses on estate planning but used to work with oil and gas.

“I started out focusing on oil and gas, I started out doing some public defense, but as quick as I could, I got fully into oil and gas,” Nuttal said. “After about 10 years of doing oil and gas, I got tired of the ups and downs, booms and busts because that’s what oil and gas does, so I started looking for something else to do. I checked out a couple of other practice areas and settled on estate planning because everybody needs some estate planning.”

He particularly wants to help families set up a kids’ protection plan, which is a legally binding plan that designates a guardian for children in the event something happens to their parents, such as a car accident or another situation that causes the parents not to return.