Emily Offerdahl

I’m a communications specialist, DIYer, gardener, mother of Mae, wife of Kyle and dog-mom to Frida.

We live in Portland, OR, in a lovely house that we are continuing to improve while we have fun living in it.

My do-it-yourself spirit comes from my parents. My dad has done hundreds of projects, some on the house they raised me in. A 100-year-old victorian beaut in Spokane, Washington. Many of those projects were on the houses I’ve lived in and owned.

As a teenager, my favorite hobby was playing volleyball, I even went on to play in college at Willamette University for a couple of years. But after college, I sought out adventure and joined the Peace Corps. I spent to year living in the northwest region of Mali, known for being very very hot. It was there that my passion for gardening flourished.

A couple of years after I returned to the U.S. and well into my tenure working for the federal government, I met my husband. He is an arborist and also has a love of gardening and landscaping.

In 2012, we bought a cute little row house in NE Washington, D.C. only to find that it was in need of a lot more work than we expected. We only lived there for 18 months before we decided to pack up and move to the west coast, but we learned an awful lot about home ownership and projects.

In 2014, we bought our little orange bungalow, which is still the best house I’ve ever lived in. It’s and 850-square-feet house, not far from where we live now and in one of the coolest neighborhoods in Portland, Alberta Arts District. It is and was in excellent condition, so we were lucky to spend more of our effort designing and maintaining our yard.

Now we live in a 1950s colonial that has undergone a number of updates over the last 30 years while other parts of it remained noticeably neglected. We work on our house and year when we’re not at our day jobs or hanging out with our kiddo. Which only means we’re very tired and it takes us a long time to get things done.