I’ve been a tinkerer my entire life. For as long as I can remember I wanted to be an architect. I nurtured that dream by building houses and things for my dolls as a child. I continued building through university, enjoying the many all-nighters constructing intricate models of the ideas in my head.

As a professional I have designed houses – and many of them – to become lifetime homes for families across the United States. The building part, however, was the domain of the carpenters and the roofers and the cabinet makers. I used my hands and actively created in other ways, like the time that I made exact replicas of my neighbor’s houses in gingerbread as Christmas gifts one manic marathon evening.

It wasn’t until after completing a master’s degree in historic preservation mid-career that I started building again. Burnt out from all the reading and writing, I began to design fun invitations for my nephew’s birthday party. Boxes soon followed. Empowered by the response on Etsy, I began to build more and more, reconnecting with one of the most intrinsic joys I have known my entire life.