About Us

I’m Becky and my husband is Jens. We have a little guy named Ivan and three fur-babies adopted from local animal shelters: Kayden, our American Akita, and two kitties, Sampson and Oleo. We live in a 1960’s ranch in a suburb of the Twin Cities, Minnesota and we’ve owned our first home for over two years now. I have a slight obsession with home improvement blogs so I decided to start a little pet project blog of our own to document some of our DIY undertakings.

Almost all of the projects completed and those planned around our house are DIY because a) we get some weird enjoyment out of it and b) we are too cheap to pay someone else to do it. I’m an engineer by profession, so I get all geeky about the planning stages of a project. Yes, I have been known to do CAD renderings and detailed material quantity and cost estimates for our home improvement projects. I’m also a bit of the crunchy granola type, so I attempt to incorporate some eco-friendly aspects to projects as I can as long as it’s not going to break our budget (which is usually quite modest).

Then there’s Jens, the one with the know-how and the brawn for actually getting a project done. He doesn’t let me play with the power tools much (with the exception of the cordless drill and sanders which hardly qualify as power tools) so I end up doing a lot of ‘supervising’ and I’m also the designated painter. Jens is a cesspool of knowledge when it comes to most construction related endeavors thanks to previously being employed doing a variety of construction jobs in rough and finish carpentry. He currently works in sales, so he enjoys being able to still get his hands dirty around the house and making sure he maintains his calluses from the days when he actually made a living from physical labor.

So far Ivan hasn’t been allowed to play with any of the power tools either, but he’s a champ at sleeping through most of the noise we make with the saws and hammers. Since Ivan was born our progress on projects have definitely slowed down a bit (as was expected) and we are still trying to find that sweet spot to balance being productive homeowners and spending quality family time. Hopefully sharing our DIY home improvement adventures with you will serve to motivate us to make progress on our projects as we share with readers some tips, tricks, and potentially even some inspiration.