How My First Build Project Completely Changed How I See Myself

Today, I couldn't ever see myself not Making things.

It's engrained in my brain and I love it. When we've gone to Disney, I see little pieces and parts that spark ideas for components or entire projects (throughout Disney, and not just Galaxy's Edge thankyouverymuch).

But I didn't start with all this inspiration and confidence that I can build something or figure out how to.

Watching On YouTube In Despair

I knew people made things, but had never put much thought into it.

After graduating college and deep into my corporate job out of school, I spent my limited free time being hyper productive playing video games and watching YouTube videos of others playing video games. During one of these rabbit hole video dives, a video of someone Making something related to a video game was recommended. I watch it and immediately switched the rabbit hole for the next few months.

There was a problem though, I wanted to Make things like I saw on YouTube, but our small apartment had no room and we couldn't use the porch. Plus, my job started taking up nights and weekends, so I stopped watching videos since I couldn't do anything with them.

That is, until I switched to a less demanding role, got married, and we bought a house.

Getting Started DIY-ing

Within hours of buying our house in 2016, we started making it our own.

We painted walls, patched some drywall nail holes and came up with tons of other things to change over the years. It was a deep learning experience because we had never done any of it before. Sure, we'd painted decor for parties and weddings, but not entire rooms before.

That was also when I first received a handful of hand-me-down tools of my very own.

The Switch From DIY To Making

After a couple of months of painting and drywall repair, I was tired of fixing things.

Freshly married and new home owners left little in the budget for things we didn't need, but we wanted a hook for our keys and dog leash. Something finally clicked and I remembered those YouTube Maker videos I had seen over a year before. I decided to make a simple key hook out of some cheap pine boards we found at a big box store.

I won't lie and say it was the most amazing thing ever built. In fact, it wasn't square, the finish , and the hooks come out the back (and it took me a week to complete...). But I still keep it because it was the first thing I ever made that we designed ourselves.

It's a simple project poorly executed, but it unlocked something that fundamentally changed how I thought about solving problems: you don't have to settle for what exists, you can make something new.