About

Howdy, This is just some more infor­ma­tion about me and where I come from:

I live in North East Ohio, I was born and raised in the area, so I’m fairly famil­iar with it. I have had a lot of dif­fer­ent jobs in my life as well as many dif­fer­ent hob­bies, some of witch I have turned into busi­nesses. I am a third gen­er­a­tion lum­ber­jack by trade, My Father and my Grand­fa­ther both have spent most of their lives out in the woods cut­ting trees so I grew up around this type of work and ended up mak­ing that a large part of my life. I have spent many years work­ing for the fam­ily busi­ness as well as work­ing for other com­pa­nies in the field. I like work­ing out in the woods and from time to time I will go back to it.

Other jobs that I have had include work­ing for horse farms in the area. When I was younger, pro­fes­sion­ally train­ing horses was one of the major goals that I had for myself. I learned how to train horses from sev­eral dif­fer­ent peo­ple, each one con­tribut­ing to my learn­ing in there own way. I did become good at train­ing and I had a good rep­u­ta­tion for it at one time. But after being in the busi­ness for a few years I started to see that pro­fes­sion­ally train­ing horses was not really what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I still love horses and I still train them when the oppor­tu­nity arises, but it is not some­thing that I care to do full time. Instead it is one of the things that will remain more of a hobby.

When I was sev­en­teen, I got a job work­ing part time in the main­te­nance dept. at a hotel and resort. This job is one that really stands out to me because it marked a sort of turn­ing point in where I was head­ing in life (although I didn’t know it at the time). It’s funny because at first I really didn’t like the job all that much, it was just a job. I remained work­ing part time for the first year before becom­ing a full time employee. Alto­gether I worked there over four years, two more as a full time main­te­nance tech­ni­cian and then over a  year as the Chief engineer/supervisor of main­te­nance. I can’t begin to mea­sure the wealth of knowl­edge I obtained work­ing for this hotel. Our main­te­nance dept. han­dled every­thing repair related in that hotel from chang­ing light bulbs and fix­ing leak­ing faucets to rebuild­ing air con­di­tion­ers and remod­el­ing entire rooms. The only work that we ever con­tracted out were jobs that we didn’t have time for or didn’t have the equip­ment for. The rea­son that I left this hotel was that it was sold and the new owner(s) turned the place upside down and com­pletely changed the way every­thing worked. With the cut backs in man power and inven­tory there was just no way for me to keep the dept. oper­a­tional. The place began to fall apart and I was dis­gusted with the sit­u­a­tion. After that I did get another job as a Main­te­nance Super­vi­sor at another hotel but that only lasted a lit­tle over a year. Over­all, work­ing in main­te­nance was what showed me that I had a nat­ural tal­ent for fig­ur­ing out prob­lems and repair­ing just about any­thing I put my mind to.

Some of the other jobs that I have tried out didn’t last long. For a short time I worked in the ship­ping dept. at  a cab­i­net fac­tory (prob­a­bly the worst job I ever had), lots of long hours stuck inside a build­ing with a whole bunch of peo­ple that I didn’t get along with. I stacked the cab­i­nets into the trucks as they came off the assem­bly lines. It was good money, but for a period of about six months, I did noth­ing but work, eat and sleep. There really wasn’t any time to do any­thing else. I also worked for a saw mill for a short time, off-bearing lum­ber. I liked the peo­ple I worked with here but I didn’t like the pay or the work. You can only stack a board so many ways before you have fig­ured the whole thing out. After eight hours of that a day, I was bored out of my skull.

For as long as I can remem­ber I have always liked build­ing things. I have prob­a­bly been build­ing (or at least try­ing to) since I could pick up a ham­mer. This attrac­tion to build­ing com­bined with what I learned from work­ing in main­te­nance is what got me started in what I am doing today; run­ning my own busi­ness as a contractor/ handy­man. I got started in this line of work a lit­tle at a time, peo­ple I knew and worked with at the hotels would ask me to do repair work for them at their houses after work. Soon I was get­ting a rep­u­ta­tion for doing good work and I was also expand­ing my knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence work­ing on dif­fer­ent projects. There were a cou­ple of times where doing the side work was all that kept me going when I was in between jobs. It finally got to the point where I decided to quit work­ing for other peo­ple and start work­ing for myself instead. Now I’m work­ing in a field where I really love what I’m doing and pro­vid­ing a very nec­es­sary ser­vice to those that need it.

Finally, one of my other life long hob­bies that I have started to turn into some­thing more would be my pho­tog­ra­phy and art work. Tak­ing pho­tos and draw­ing have always been some­thing that I enjoy doing. But I have now started to put my work out there a lit­tle more and I have found that I have even more fun doing it on request. I have had the oppor­tu­nity to do the pho­tog­ra­phy for a cou­ple of wed­dings, cal­en­dar shoots, prod­uct shoots and a cou­ple of years ago I got involved with a local Car Cruise tak­ing pic­tures of the cars and print­ing the pho­tos for the award plaques. Many of the par­tic­i­pants at the car cruise really like the images that I come up with and so I started tak­ing orders for pho­tos, posters, busi­ness cards and fly­ers. On top of that I was in charge of all of the lay­outs and designs for all of the car cruise’s literature.

So in clos­ing, I will say that I have packed a lot of expe­ri­ences into what seems like a short amount of time and I am grate­ful for all of them. They have all made me the per­son that I am today. In the future I can only hope to con­tinue to learn and expe­ri­ence as many new things as pos­si­ble and per­haps, pass on the ben­e­fits of my expe­ri­ence to others.