If you've been a long-time viewer of our videos...you've probably heard this a few times! Every single week it's, "Maybe one day we'll expand beyond the garage..." But when?! When will you finally do it?! Uhh....technically this past week, I guess. It might not be a commercial space yet, but we're one small step closer to our "big goals" (or "pickles" for some of you out there lol) Let's start at the beginning. Why did we feel like it was time to "expand beyond the garage?".

So, you've officially decided to start making money with your hobby. That's a big, exciting step!! You want to find a ton of customers who love what you do and keep coming back for more. But how do you do that? How do you find customers that appreciate your work and are willing to pay for the time you've spent mastering your craft? What traits do those kinds of customers have? Being able to tell if a stranger will make a good customer is a skill that takes A LOT of practice.

Our cutting board processes and checklists have been a success so far! We're super happy with how far we've come with those. But now it's time to shift our focus to charcuterie boards! We essentially need to repeat our process for optimizing cutting boards....again! We very quickly realized that the hardest part to make "repeatable" was going to be the handles of the boards! The rest of the process (cutting the lumber to size, milling, sanding, engraving) is pretty easy to wr

That's the question we set out to answer this past week! And it wasn't for click bait. It wasn't to sound cool or to get likes online. It was a LEGITIMATE goal that we set for ourselves!! You may think it sounds crazy, but that's okay, because WE DID TOO! But we wanted it to be crazy. Actually, we needed it to be crazy.... So all of this started with a bit of a thought experiment: We wanted to figure out what the max capacity of our little shop was. Why? Because we knew we'd

It's what shows up instantly on all of your social media platforms! It's what clients see and remember on your website! It's what you put on t-shirts, stickers, and mugs! Picking a good name for your business is important for MANY reasons, but we've gotten quite a few questions from people on what a good name actually looks like and why we chose ours. If you're having a hard time choosing a name, or you're stuck between a couple options and just can't find the right one....yo

So you're probably thinking to yourself...."Wow, since they've already had to start their business once when they lived in North Dakota, they should be experts at it now in Houston!" HA! hahahaha Not quite...I mean, yes, some things are easier and we're a little bit better at predicting problems, but starting a business is just a difficult thing to do all around. Basically, we want to make sure we do everything right this time around and really get organized and create solid

If you've been around for a while, you'll know it's been a long journey from building our serving boards, to finishing, to testing, to creating a customer experience, to refinishing services, and FINALLY....to PACKAGING!! We took some time to research what type of packing we wanted to go with...but here's what we ultimately decided on ....(for now).... Check out the video we made all about it! Like we talked about in our previous blog post, we need to keep the cost of these b

If you read our last post and watched our last video, you’ll know that the past few months have been spent prototyping the projects we plan to batch out! We’re looking for simple, yet high quality designs that can be built quickly and in a very organized and repeatable way! Now that we’ve figured out our charcuterie board process, we’ve moved on to the cutting boards we plan to sell to realtors as closing gifts for their clients. Before we started the process of nailing down

Welcome back to yet ANOTHER addition to the beloved serving board series! If you haven’t been keeping up with the series and how/why we started it, check out the previous blog posts below: Building Testing Finishing Long story long, we started out by making 100 serving boards to test our processes when it came to purchasing lumber, milling, cutting to size, sanding, and finishing. We wanted to figure out where our sticking points would be and fix them in our checklists before

We were able to make it back to Texas for a bit and we decided to knock out a project we have been meaning to accomplish for MONTHS now! In ONE weekend we built a desk for our new office/recording studio! Check out the video below! But this video also had… MANY, MANY adventures wrapped up inside of it as well… The Desk Build Ever since we moved into our new place in Texas, we’ve been wanting an office space that would be perfect for everyday work (editing, filming, recording,

“You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.” – Jim Rohn A lot of us have heard this quote before. It basically means that the people you spend the most time with end up influencing your life and decisions the most. Because of this, we obviously want to be very intentional about who those 5 people are! If we surround ourselves with negative people who are always doubting us and our goals…chances are…we’ll start to doubt ourselves and our goals. But…you m

We truly hope that this post finds you safe and in good health! These last couple months have been a crazy time for us all (especially the last 2 weeks!!) We’ve seen schools close, people quarantined, and essentially all commercial flight diminish. But perhaps the most relevant effect of the COVID-19 virus has been the sheer amount of people working from home and telecommuting. All of a sudden even those with the most rigid and repetitive of daytime routines are left wonderin

Well, here we are. It’s New Year’s Eve of 2019 – just a few hours until the NEW DECADE! It feels like Christmas flew by!! For a lot of us, it’s probably the time where we’re thinking about our New Year’s Resolutions and all the plans (big or small) we have for 2020! For some of us, this can be really hard to do!! Like honestly, what aspects of your life or future are important enough to you that you want to dedicate the next 365 days (and beyond) to them? Asking yourself a qu

So we’re pretty much all moved into our new place down here and are now figuring out all of the furniture we will need to build for ourselves. As much as I wish we could have fit our couches, coffee table, kitchen table, and entertainment center in the trailer – we sadly could not. Like not even close. Not a single one of those items made the move with us. Instead we sold them all to re-build and re-buy once we got down here to Texas. So we bought a new sectional to go in our

Hi there! This blog post is going to be a little different than our usual “how we built this” or “how we priced this” type content. It’s one we’ve wanted to do for a while, so we’re pretty excited to share it with you!! A lot of you know that we’re “a young couple starting a woodworking business because when we graduated college, typical furniture was WAY too expensive for us – so we decided to build it instead”. That’s the canned Instagram bio story. Well, here’s some more b

It feels SO good to finally be able to say this after a LONG week of re-arranging, sweeping, lifting heavy tools, and building shop furniture… OUR SHOP IS FINALLY DONE!! As much as we wished we could just spend an entire month getting every single detail of this space EXACTLY the way we want it…we kind of had to knock it out as quickly as possible – and here’s why: Every week the shop isn’t finished and we’re not building….we’re not making money!! We quit our full time jobs f

So for the past few months we’ve been talking about how when we moved down to Texas from North Dakota we would be tearing down our entire shop and having to build it all over again. Well, the time has come and here we are. With a garage full of boxes covered in tape and moderately helpful labels. Because we need to get out and start finding clients, we VERY quickly need to get unpacked, figure out an efficient shop layout, and build storage/shelving units! We can’t really mak

Along with all of the fun and exciting things you learn when starting a woodworking business come plenty of lessons that you only want to learn once. …ask us how we know… But seriously! There are quite a few common mistakes that all of us looking to start a business typically walk right into – whether it be somewhat obvious at the time or not. Most of these lessons we learned in hind-sight, but a very few we were able to catch. Which is why we decided to compile them all into

Because we’re secretly amazing artists who just decided to build furniture?? Definitely not…(Ha! let’s be honest we’re both nerds who decided to pick up a pencil). Nope, we got into sketching furniture because we learned that our clients really liked it and it got us all on the same page of what the piece was going to look like in the end! There were no surprises or unexpected elements when it came time for the reveal because the customer had already seen the details going in

If you’ve watched or scrolled past any of our content lately (ehhh…like in the last 8 months I guess…) you’ll probably see one recurring theme in all of it – WE’RE MOVING! Yep. We both got brand new jobs and we are packing up our entire lives and moving across the country. Isn’t that a bit crazy, you say?? We just got our ideal shop set up and a solid customer base in our area…. Well, folks…these jobs are PART-TIME. That’s right. That means we will have twice the time to put