Jason Bennett has been wearing a lot of hats lately, doing or overseeing flooring, roofing, painting, electrical and plumbing duties while dabbling in a bit of historic preservation and trying to launch an entrepreneurial venture.

Now Bennett, a former Warren County Public Schools bus driver, is ready to wear just one hat: restaurateur.

Bennett and his wife, Donna, after putting nearly two years of sweat equity into a dilapidated but historic former country store, are ready to open the refurbished Drake Diner.

Last week, on all fours working on the diner’s new floor while a contractor prepared to install a new metal roof, Bennett ventured a guess as to how much he has invested in the building he and his wife purchased in 2016.

“It will be close to $20,000 by the time the roof gets done,” said Bennett, 43. “We did the plumbing last year. We put in new windows, new wiring and a new door. We painted the walls and put in a new gravel parking lot.”

It will all be worth it, the Bennetts say, when the building that has been home to a country store, a vinyl records emporium, a post office and sandwich shop over its 90-year history opens its new door as a full-service restaurant Thursday.

“I’ve always wanted to have a restaurant,” said Bennett. “I’ve always cooked.”

His dream is coming true in an unlikely locale along Ky. 622 in Warren County’s Drake community near the Simpson County line. It’s far from the heavily traveled Bowling Green roads where eateries flourish, but the Bennetts think they can cash in on the goodwill established during the building’s nine decades.

“What drew us to it was the history, the country flair,” said Donna Bennett. “We want to keep that.”

They hope to do so by serving breakfast, lunch and dinner Monday through Saturday and a Sunday brunch.

The couple has reason to believe it will work, having operated a breakfast-and-lunch eatery out of the location for a few months after buying it from Wendell Charlton in 2016.

“It will be Southern home cooking,” said Donna Bennett. “We’ll have homemade desserts, catfish on Fridays and a Sunday buffet. We had the buffet before and had a good turnout. A lot of people don’t want to go all the way back into town to eat after church.”

That first flirtation with running a restaurant ended last October, when the Bennetts realized the building needed major repairs.

Although the 2,100-square-foot building will have a new look and a new name, the owners plan to pay homage to a history that’s richer than the earthquake cake they plan to include on the menu.

The old “Drake Country Store” sign will hang inside, along with old photos from when the building was C.M. Duncan and Son Grocery and later the Freeman Kitchens Grocery.

In keeping with the store’s fame as a location for finding rare country-and-western records and as a venue for live music, the Bennetts have built a small outdoor stage where local bands will play.

The live music will start Saturday, when local band The Get Down is scheduled to perform starting at 4 p.m.

“During the spring and summer we’ll have live music on weekends,” said Donna Bennett. “We hope to bring some new people out. A lot of people don’t know that we’re back.”

Already, the Bennetts have scheduled a performance by a local band called BandZazzy for April 28. Such events are in keeping with the building’s past, when members of the Carter Family and other country artists performed there.

That was when Kitchens was running the country store and sandwich shop and selling his vast collection of records out of the building, which also served as a post office. Kitchens, who bought the building in 1950 and owned it until he sold it to Charlton in 1996, still lives next door and sells records and other collectibles out of his house.

Kitchens, 91 and a past president of the Carter Family fan club, is happy to see the building he owned for nearly five decades being resurrected, even if it’s a departure from the store he ran.

“I didn’t have a restaurant,” said Kitchens, the walls of his small shop adorned with autographed photos of Johnny Cash and other recording artists. “We had sandwiches and groceries. I hope they (the Bennetts) do well with it.”

It’s not likely that the Bennetts will have a tenure in the building as long as Kitchen’s, but Jason Bennett does have some long-term plans.

“We’re going to cater and do some delivery,” he said. “We’ll do some fundraisers for schools. We want to get open and get going before we do that.”