Our Story

Welcome to our little corner of the Internet - we are so glad you are here! For this very first blog post, we are sharing some of our story. This business is just the latest step in a long journey for our family.

The first step was probably when Dan convinced Carrie to try homeschooling. He thought it was a great idea and she was sure it wasn't going to work but... it did. Homeschooling meant that we spent a lot of time together. Obviously, Carrie and the kids were home together all day, every day, but the culture that came out of homeschooling was one of doing things as a family. We did a homeschool co-op with other families that encouraged the dads to be involved. Honestly, it was weird when we didn't do things as a family.

Homeschooling, among other things, allows kids to work at their own pace and pursue their own interests. As the kids got older, it became more and more clear that college and a 9-5 job office job were probably not in their futures. Sarah did get some college credit but a year after high school, she decided to go all in on photography. Joe thought he was going to try baseball and pursued that for a year but then got a job where he was trained as a welder. Mark got a part-time job during his senior year of high school and then went full time after graduation. Everyone liked their jobs.

It must be mentioned that another thing that we liked to do, but especially the boys, was make things. We saved scraps of all kinds of materials and created endless things. As we grew up, Mark became the primary maker and you would not believe the things he can create with foam and cardboard and hot glue :) That translated to more sophisticated materials like leather and wood as he got older and the rest of us started throwing around the idea of him starting a business. When Joe got into welding, we suggested that they go in together. But they liked their jobs so we never seriously discussed it further.

Then we moved and Mark's commute went from less than 10 minutes to over 30! He was looking around for a closer job and thinking about switching trades to learn a new skill when his work shut down for a time. When it reopened, he did not go back but went to school for a semester to learn machining. After that semester, when he was not really finding jobs that were a good fit for him anywhere close to where we live, the idea of a family business started in earnest.

The timing worked well. We live on some property and have the building space for a wood shop, metal shop, and a weld shop. The boys are at stages of life where they have the margin to take a risk like this. And with Dan not far from retiring from his corporate job, he was going to look for another job anyway, and this lets us all be home together and allows us to have margin to run our homestead.

We are a family who is used to doing things together. We like being with each other and we are used to living a lifestyle that allows us to be flexible. Working for ourselves lets us do that. Homeschooling was our first adventure. Now we are homesteading, small business owners. Let the new adventure begin!


Thank you for your interest in our business. The goal/hope/plan is to blog once a week but please bear with us as we work out our schedule of what happens when. You can help us by commenting below with ideas of what you'd like to see us write about. Until next time!