We recently connected with Wendy Crist and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Wendy, thanks for joining us today. Almost all entrepreneurs have had to decide whether to start now or later? There are always pros and cons for waiting and so we’d love to hear what you think about your decision in retrospect. If you could go back in time, would you have started your business sooner, later or at the exact time you started?

My husband Tim and I have always been “makers”, or creatives. We have been a couple for just about 30 years now and we’ve not always had the money to be able to buy what might be our taste so we would just figure out a way to make something similar. For decades we just created in order to fulfill our own needs and wants. While I suppose making a living as an artist or as a creative sounded fun it didn’t seem like something that would pay the bills. My father was an accomplished woodworker and while that was his passion, he had to make money in other ways. Seeing that firsthand made us a little hesitant to make the leap from a steady income to following our dreams.

Once we made the decision to take a leap of faith, we were full steam ahead. Making a living doing something that fulfills your creative spirit doesn’t feel like work. Seeing the spaces we create come alive is so rewarding. Sure, it’s time-consuming and labor intensive, but in the end, the satisfaction of the end result is worth all of the struggles and long hours along the way. To see our clients love the spaces we’ve created for them to live in, and raise their families (or dogs) in, is just so powerful and truly rewarding.

Hindsight is always 20/20, right? So if I had it to do all over again would I start this journey sooner? 100% yes. But maybe that timing wouldn’t have been right either. Maybe I would have not had the passion for the work that I do now. My advice would be this: do what you love and the money will follow. For now, I’m going to follow my own advice.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a self-taught designer and licensed real estate broker and Tim is just about the handiest guy around. Together, we collaborate together on our projects. Our business, The Happening Home, has a few different facets:

On our projects, we find homes in fabulous neighborhoods that are tired and ready for some new life and we reinvent and renovate them as if they were going to be our own home. We focus not only on adding detail and charm but functionality for modern-day living. We are drawn to a cozy, laid-back design that combines textures that complement one another and add visual interest, in essence, we aspire to make a hygge {cozy} home. Once we’ve completed our project home it goes up on the market.

With our real estate clients, we assist with both the aspect of selling their existing home and buying of their new home. We are with them for every step of the process, the search, the inspection, the closing, and even the design possibilities of the new home. We offer our consultation services to collaborate with contractors to bring the full vision of a dream home to fruition.

Lastly, we have a large clientele of folks who just need our design services to make the homes they already have a dream home. Those services can be tailored to the project and the client’s needs.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Social media is a weakness of mine. While I understand the importance, I just don’t take the time necessary to get it done. Both of our daughters are in their twenties and they think we “suck” at it. They are not wrong. When we finished our most recent project house our daughters made a TikTok account for us and put up a video that went viral and got nearly 600,000 views. I guess they know what they are doing… I will learn from them and follow their lead from now on.

How’d you meet your business partner?

Tim loves to tell the story of how we met. I grew up in Winter Park, Colorado. He grew up in Dallas. Once he finished college he decided to take a year and head to the mountains to ski for a year before finding a “real” job. He remembers meeting me on one of his first days in town, in the soup aisle of Safeway. My memory is terrible so we will have to trust his account of this. It would be another year or so before we actually went on a date. Here we are 30 years later, with 2 grown daughters, and a business where we work side-by-side every day.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thehappeninghome.com
• Instagram: thehappeninghome
• Other: tiktok: @thehappeninghome

Image Credits
SoCo Home Photography (all of the design images) Kyleigh Crist (took the photo of us together)