BudDIY Podcast – Episode 1 – Hello DIY World

In this the first episode of the BudDIY podcast I introduce myself to the DIY world, and talk a little bit about my history. I haven’t ventured outside of the software world too far in almost 20 years. Which means I don’t really know what I am doing, but I really want to learn.

To be honest I am not sure where this will go over the course of the next year, but I would like you to listen and help me find out. Feel free to guide me, and help grow a community around learning DIY. At the end of they day that is the goal. To learn to DIY better, create a better life because of it, and increase my freedom from everything else. As well as start a business, and help others learn.

Or you can watch the video version

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the first episode of the BudDIY podcast, where we’re going to talk about life, liberty, and DIY. So since this is the first episode, I wanted to talk a little bit about what this podcast is and what I’m doing and a little bit about who I am and where I this see going forth into the future.

Firstly, I’ve always wanted to do a podcast. So this is meeting a life goal that I’ve always had. Well, always had. I’ve always had since 2004 when I first found out about podcasting. I listen to podcasts every day, I love them. I have a lot of fun and I learn a ton of stuff. It helps my inquisitive nature; I love learning things. And so podcasts give me that opportunity. I’ve always wanted to do one, and so now I’m kind of just jumping in and doing one.

Even though, to be honest, I haven’t fully formed out what I want to do with the podcast and what I’m doing here. I just know that I’m changing things in my life. I’m changing directions in my life. It’s not like a midlife crisis. I mean, I don’t know if I’m that old. It’s just more of a evolution of who I am in life. And I’m just kind of changing directions.

I’ve been successful in what I’ve done now as a software developer, but I realize it has led to complications and issues for me. Specifically, I spend 12 to 18 hours a day on a couch, or in a chair, or my computer, or somewhere, and I got really unhealthy. So unhealthy, in fact, that when I first got a bike to ride, it did take about two months for me to basically throw my back out. Then took me two years to recover from that in order to be able to ride again. Unfortunately, I still haven’t gotten back to riding, but I’m better physically for that.

It took me two years to recover because I almost didn’t change anything that I did. I continued to just sit on the couch all the time or sit on my chair on my computer all the time. And I didn’t do much physically to resolve that situation other than go to the chiropractor. So it took a really long time. And had I been better and more proactive and done more working out and other things like that, the recovery time would’ve been a lot sooner.

It’s a long history of my health and my situation. What does that mean? Why am I going there? Well, it goes to something along the way I started reading about eating healthier. I started wondering like, “Why do I get sick every year? I get a cold every year?” Kind of suffering from one right now. Why is that? What’s going on?” And one of the things that I found along the research is, my diet’s not that great. Still not that great, but it’s a lot better than it was.

I decided to do some research into that, and what are other people doing? I found that other people, they’ve gone organic and they’ve gone… all this other stuff; soy-free, organic, vegan, all this other crap. And I’m like, “I’m not going vegan. I really like steak. I like it a lot. So that’s not going to happen. But what are other things I can do? What are some truths inside of this veganism movement, inside of the eating healthy and the organic and all this other stuff?” So I started learning, started researching. It’s something that I love doing.

One thing that I found out is a lot of factory farms where your eggs and your chicken and your meat come from are not the funnest places to eat what they produce. We’re going to go with that, and we’re going to keep it light. So after that I was like, “Man, that’s crazy.”

Then I found a guy named Joel Salatin. I read several of his books and any other description where he compared his chicken that he raised on pasture with feedlots, CAFO, concentrated feed places. And they were more nutritious, they were healthier, and all kinds of other things. And I’m like, “Wow, that’s great. Let’s go eat organic chicken.” And then I went to buy organic chicken and I’m like, “Let’s not eat organic chicken anymore, because this is expensive.”

However, my health needs to improve, and so I was like, “How can I do this some other way?” So I’m like, “Why don’t I raise chickens?” And that has led me on a journey over the last couple of years that has changed my life. I have raised chickens for two years now. I’ve done meat chickens. And I’ve done the entire process. I drove up to a hatchery in Missouri and picked up the chickens and drove them home, put them in a brooder. I mean, these chickens were literally a day old, raised them for the eight weeks to fill them out. And then I processed them myself in my property here. I live out in the country. I live on two acres. I’m calling it a homestead. So, on my homestead I processed the chickens. A friend came over and we did it. And it was pretty good chicken. I’m willing to bet it was healthier than any chicken that I buy at stores.

It was probably more expensive than organic chicken from the store, just because I had to build a lot of stuff. I had to build a mobile chicken coop, and had to buy all the feed. I had to source the feed. I mean, in reality it was more expensive than what I could buy at the store that first time. This last time, it came in just slightly cheaper than what I can buy at the store because there were still a few things that I was trying to figure out.

How do I still have all that stuff, I still have all the experiences? So the next time I do meat chickens, it’s going to be a lot cheaper to get that pasture-raised organic, high-mineral and high-nutrition content chicken. And it’s going to be healthier for me and my family.

Now, this isn’t a podcast about health, I’m just kind of telling you where things have changed in my life. I’ve gone from someone that again, spends a lot of my time in a chair to someone that’s a little more active now. Along the way, I was building the chicken tractor and decided, “You know, I like the process of building these chicken tractors. This is fun. I wish I had done this with my dad more growing up, and I wish I had enjoyed it then.”

I think part of being kid, part of being a teenager is, is when your parents want you to do something and you just automatically have that mental synapse, “I don’t want to do it.” Like, “No. I don’t want to ever want…” I would tell my parents, “I don’t ever want to have to do that. I want to pay somebody to do that.” And I can’t afford that. But I decided that, “Hey, you know what? I enjoy the process. Let’s do it again.”

I got some laying hands. This last year I built a mobile chicken coop called the chick shop, and I moved that around my property. That’s helping the fertilization, it helps revitalize the soil that’s on my property. It’s really, really, really cool. And I’ll probably go into that more in depth in another video. And it’s something that’s kind of a DIY thing. It’s something I learned and I’m putting into practice and I’m doing. I’m really enjoying it.

But jumping back in, as I’m doing more of this stuff, I felt better. And not only was I enjoying what I was doing and feeling better, and getting a little healthier along the way, I felt like I was doing more productive things in life. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was just because I was going outside for a change. It’s been a long period of time outside. I don’t know, to get the Vitamin D, whatever.

I started looking up stuff I never looked up before like doing woodworking. It looks like a lot of fun now. When I was a kid I could care less. I mean, it was interesting when my dad would build stuff growing up. I’d go out and help him for a few minutes because he had something big and needed help hold the glue on. And I would watch what he would do, but I would never do it myself. I did a couple of things and they all look like crap but they got the job done. But watching people do woodworking on YouTube and trying to figure out exactly how they do, it’s just been a lot more interesting.

I think it goes back to the technical side of me being a software developer, and building stuff out of wood is also a technical engineering craft. And so it’s become a lot more interesting. So to that end, this last year, I bought a cabinet saw, an old 1970s Delta Unisaw. It’s a three-horsepower, three-phase table saw, old school from one of their online auctions. And I tore it down. Never done anything like that. I’ve been interested in videos where people do it, but I’m like, “Eh, that’s not my thing.” I tore it down and restored it, put it back together. And now the thing runs beautifully. I learned a lot in the process. I thought I would never do that. It’s totally shocked my parents and my wife that I’m getting into doing any of this stuff.

I feel like I am not the only one in my industry, in the software development industry or in potentially other industries that is starting to make changes in their life to do more DIY. Heck, I’ve talked to a lot of homesteaders over the last couple of years. A lot of them are in software and they’ve kind of gone through a metamorphosis that I have and changing what they do. That’s why I’m doing this, because I don’t look at myself as intelligent. I don’t look at myself as some person that’s different than everyone else. I look at myself as a fairly average person.

I feel like if I can do something other people can too. But at the end of the day, also, I have the heart of a teacher. And anytime I learned something new, the very first thing I want to do is go tell somebody about the thing that I just learned, and how they can do it too. Not only how they can do it, but how they can learn how to do it better and faster and quicker and understand more than I did.

If we go back to the chickens, for example, I spent a year researching chickens. If I had known then what I know now, I shouldn’t have waited that long, but I didn’t know. And so, someday I want to put together some content to help people learn chickens. I have to use a bunch of different resources. Maybe I can try and put together that one stop shop for someone.

I also want to do this because people have different learning style, and so I want to be able to help people that are better with my type of learning. Yeah, there’s a lot of content about the stuff that I’m going to do that’s already out there on the internet, but sometimes people don’t learn well with some of the other stuff that’s out there, and they need an alternative. I want to try to provide that.

To that end, I also want to turn this into a business if I can. I mean, I’m going to be honest and upfront about that. I’m not going to lie, deceive and be like, “Oh, I’m just doing this all for fun.” And then maybe someday turn it into a business. Up front, I want to turn this into a business.

I do enjoy software development. It’s a lot of fun to me. But I’ve also always wanted to own my own business. And the types of ideas that I come up with for software are all dumb. I’m just going to be honest. I mean, they’re not worth paying for. And the ideas that I come up with that could be worth paying for, or they’re worth paying for… because I don’t want to pay somebody else from a bigger application, and so they’re not really that great.

The ideas that I have, though, that are really interesting and really good is content; teaching people stuff. Those are the ideas I come up with five a day almost, I feel like sometimes, on things that I could teach people stuff. And I really enjoy doing that. That’s my thing. I love teaching people stuff. And so that’s why I’m doing this video and podcast and I’m going to want to do the website. I want to learn and teach other people. That’s really at the end of the day what this is.

On that end, let’s talk about a little bit on what I want to do with the podcast, what I want to do with my website, and other mediums that I’m going to use. I mean, we’re 14 minutes in and that’s kind of an important thing. I want to use the podcast as a place to put out ideas and have discussions with people and help other people learn in various ways. One of those ways is through my failures and through other people’s failures, in all honesty. I feel like failing is not a bad thing. It’s just a process and a journey of getting better.

I have made mistakes so many times, it’s not even funny. And I’ve always tried to learn from those mistakes. And so that’s what I want to do. On every episode, I want to do a failure segment. And failures don’t have to be big. I mean, I’ve had failures where I cut a board wrong. And that was the last board I had of that, so I had to run to Lowe’s and pick up some more wood. I was like, “Oh, A, should have double-checked the measurement and, B, should have double-checked that I had a little bit of extra wood for the project I was working on. My bad.” I very rarely made that particular mistake since, because that set a whole bunch of stuff back that I was working on that project. But that’s not really a big failure. That’s an annoyance. But I look at that as a failure and an opportunity to try to learn.

Another failure is, I ran a business for six years as a side business that I couldn’t ever turn into a full time business, even though that’s what I really wanted. I just couldn’t get it there. And at the end of the day, I have theories as to why I couldn’t get it there, but I’m not sure because obviously, I didn’t make it.

Now, I had successes along the way, I learned a lot. My family is not an entrepreneurial family. And so it was an opportunity to learn a lot about entrepreneurship. So in that sense, there were successes. I also made almost $50,000 in six years. That’s nothing to gripe about. And so there was success side of that. But at the end of the day, the business [inaudible 00:14:40] failure. And I’m happy about it.

That’s kind of what has led me to here. I want to teach people, want to engage with people. I also want to be able to do that in a way I’m familiar with. I’m familiar with doing video and audio, blog post. And so I want to do that, and I want to connect with other people and help teach other people. And I want to do this podcast.

To be honest, I don’t know what this podcast is going to look like in a year. I don’t. I don’t know what my website is going to look like in a year. I don’t know what any of the other mediums; Facebook, or Instagram, or what all that stuff is going to look like in a year, because I’m still trying to figure this thing out. I’m still trying to figure out where I want to go and what I want to do.

With that, I mean, if you all could help me do that, it’d be appreciated. But at the end of the day, I want this thing to be about two things; learning and not only learning how to do stuff for yourself, and to improve your life, to improve what you’re doing, your projects, but also to learn from failures. I don’t feel like enough people talk about their failures, and I want to be a change on that. That’s something that I want to discuss, the things that I failed at, so that other people can learn from my mistakes.

I feel like I’ve learned from others’ mistakes that I haven’t had to make them. So I want to give people the opportunity to learn from mine. So yeah, with that, go out there, have fun, do something interesting. Make a change in your life, and we’ll see you next time. Thank you for your time, and have a great day.