About

My name is Allison.  I like to write.

I grew up in the New South, but headed north for school.  Many of my friends headed east to New York City after graduating.  I headed west to the Rust Belt, following a boy.

This is K.  We’re married.

And here’s N.  The three of us live in a brick building that was falling down before the guys got their hands on it.  They’ve been buddies and business partners since high school, and started fixing up the building in 2007 to be their retail space and workshop.  I pitched in every now and then with the demolition, roof replacement, wall framing, and so on until my desk job let me go and I moved in to better help with the drywall.

We drank a lot of Mountain Dew during that period.  We’re not proud.

Now our place is a storefront on the ground floor, our apartment upstairs, and a garden out back.  We fix stuff and sell it.  I do the cooking but not the dishes.  While living and working here together, we’ve been figuring out how to live the best way possible on a shoestring.  Several people have called us “brave.”

This blog is an attempt to document our lifestyle: for friends to read about, for our own future reference, and as a creative outlet on my part.  Hopefully you’ll get some laughs and recipes out of it.

We believe in reusing, repurposing, regifting, ungarbaging, buying local, buying used, living well, and doing without.  It’s a lifestyle that fits well with our ethical sensibilities and our wallets.  I think I made up one of those words?

Plenty of other young people are figuring out ways to live that they wouldn’t have planned on pre-recession.  We’re just three of a new generation of hungry weirdo entrepreneurs living life on their own terms.