This is 30 Days of Blogging: Day 19
I recently realized that though we have our bio on our website, it doesn’t say a lot about us and we’ve never introduced ourselves. It’s taken long enough so here we go.
Hi! We are Michael & Nicole. We’ve been married for five years and live in the beautiful South. We grew up here more or less, though I (Nicole) spent the first part of my life out west.
How did we meet?
We actually didn’t meet until several years after college and we both had full time jobs. Micheal is an architect (hence his DIY skills!) and I am an office manager. Believe it or not we met playing pick-up frisbee. Michael asked me out just a few weeks after we met. I was a little hesitant and didn’t agree right away, but I eventually decided to give him a shot and the rest is history.
What’s important to us in life?
We love Jesus. He will always be the most important thing in our lives, and we are here to worship him and share his love with others.
Family, community, travel, mental health, and creativity are also really important to us.
Our Family
Michael loves being in his workshop (garage) doing woodwork, welding, piddling around or anything that has to do with tools. He’s super creative and loves to design as well. He’s often got SketchUp open, working on whatever random idea is on his mind. Unless that is we have a client project to work on! He really loves building custom furniture.
I am a good bit less creative than Michael, but I love making our house a home, cooking, and doing smaller scale DIY, such as crafts and furniture refinishing. I’ve struggled with depression for over eight years and find a lot of relief in doing small creative things with my hands (but not in place of medication and counseling!).
We recently welcomed baby E into our family and we love her so much. Although we decided to wait to have kids until we had some time to just be married, we are so excited to watch our family grow and couldn’t imagine not having our daughter!
Travel
Besides DIY and furniture building, the we love to travel! We got to take a trip to Italy a year and half ago and it was the best trip ever! We honeymooned in Canada and we’ve also taken several smaller trips here in the States. We definitely look forward to taking a lot more trips in the future, but internationally and some closer to home.
How did we get into DIY & Furniture Making?
Well since Architecture school, Michael has always been designing and/or building something. Once we got married he started building furniture for our house.
I got some building experience when my family built our house and we always did repairs, projects, decorating etc. ourselves. I also always enjoyed painting. Since Michael hates painting, I became the painter/finisher for the furniture Michael built.
Eventually we started to doing more creative DIY projects, and our friends started asking about custom furniture. After doing one project for a friend, we realized how satisfying it was to get to create something exactly the way someone wants it. We get to make other’s ideas come to life! We never stopped.
What’s Next?
We learn how to do life with our little girl; we keep doing DIY and custom furniture when we can. We keep traveling we were able. And we keep learning how to love others, find joy in a simple life, and enjoy each other and the people in our lives.
We love that we get to share a little bit of life with you and hope that you find some hope, encouragement, and joy.