I was born in Brooklyn in 1973. Kings County Hospital, April, one of those cold spring weeks where it can’t decide if it’s still winter. My parents Curtis and Shirley had moved up from Georgia a few years earlier, looking for work, looking for something, and they found it for a while. My dad worked factory jobs. My mom worked retail, customer service, whatever paid. We lived in a walk-up that always smelled like whatever the neighbors were cooking, which was fine because the neighbors could cook.

We moved to Atlanta when I was five. 1978. I don’t remember much about leaving Brooklyn except that my mom cried and my dad didn’t, and I thought that meant my dad wasn’t sad, but I was five and I didn’t understand that some people just hold it different.

Atlanta was red clay and humidity and pollen that would coat your car yellow if you left it outside for two days. We lived in a neighborhood where everybody knew everybody and if you did something stupid three blocks away your mom would know about it before you got home. I don’t know how. I still don’t know how. Some kind of parent network that existed before phones could do anything.

My dad worked at a factory that made parts for something, I never really understood what, and he came home tired most days but he always had time to fix whatever was broken. That’s what I remember most. Something breaks, dad fixes it. Faucet leaking, dad fixes it. Door won’t close right, dad fixes it. I would watch him and hand him tools and he would explain what he was doing even though I was too young to understand most of it. He used to say, about his tools, he used to say “don’t make future you clean up after present you.” He meant put your tools away when you’re done. But it applies to everything. I think about that a lot now.

My mom Shirley worked at Sears for years. Customer service. Dealing with people returning things, complaining about things, wanting things they couldn’t have. She never brought that home though. At home she was all about keeping the house right. Saturday mornings smelled like Pine-Sol and whatever else she was using and if you left your room messy she would stand in your doorway and just look at you until you fixed it. She didn’t yell. She didn’t have to. She used to say that how you do the small things is how you do everything. I thought that was annoying when I was twelve. I think it’s the truest thing anyone ever told me now.

I had a woodshop teacher in middle school named Mr. Davis. This is the part of the story that matters and I’m probably going to spend too long on it but I don’t care because without Mr. Davis I don’t know what I would have done with my life. He was an older Black man, maybe late fifties when I had him, and he had been teaching woodshop for decades at that point. He had hands that looked like they had built a thousand things and they had. He was patient in a way that teachers aren’t always patient, especially with kids who don’t want to be there, but I wanted to be there. I loved that class. I loved the smell of sawdust and the sound of the band saw and the feeling of taking raw lumber and turning it into something. Mr. Davis saw that. He told me once, I was maybe fourteen, he said “Mark, you’re good at something that doesn’t require a scholarship or a draft pick. You’ve got hands that can build a life, not just a highlight reel.” I remember exactly where I was standing when he said that. I remember the project I was working on, it was a jewelry box for my mom, it was crooked and the lid didn’t close right but I was proud of it. He was proud of it too. He told me that not everybody gets to do work that matters with their hands and that I had a gift and I shouldn’t waste it. I was fourteen. I didn’t know what to do with that. I just kept showing up.

There was a basketball game in 1988. Dominique Wilkins against Larry Bird. I watched it at a friend’s house, bunch of us crowded around a TV that was too small, and Dominique was just doing things that didn’t seem possible. The Human Highlight Film. And I remember thinking that there were a lot of ways to be great at something. Dominique was flashy and exciting and he did things his own way even when people said he should play different. That’s not really connected to anything. I just think about that game sometimes. Anyway.

My family moved to Texas when I was sixteen or seventeen. My dad got a job, better pay, and we went. I finished high school there. I missed Atlanta. I missed the humidity and the food and Mr. Davis even though I wasn’t in his class anymore. Texas was fine. Different. Dry heat instead of wet heat. Cowboys instead of Falcons. Stevie Ray Vaughan on the radio.

I started working in construction and renovation in my late teens, early twenties. Commercial projects mostly. I traveled a lot through the 90s. Chicago. San Diego. Back to Texas. I worked. I got good. That’s it.

I got married in 1999. Raquel. She’s been putting up with me for over twenty-five years now and I don’t know why but I’m grateful. We have four kids. Milton who’s twenty-four now. Richard who’s twenty-two. Janelle who’s nineteen. And Amber who we call Peach, she’s sixteen, the nickname is a Georgia thing even though she was born in Texas.

The same year I got married I made the worst decision of my professional life. I partnered with a guy named Ben to start a company. MB Home Renovations. M for Mark, B for Ben. Clever. We were going to do residential renovations, high-end stuff, and Ben was going to handle the business side while I did the work. I trusted him. I trusted him completely.

He disappeared with $72,000. Client deposits. Materials money. Everything. Just gone. I tried to find him for a while and then I stopped trying because what was I going to do. The clients were owed work and I was the one whose face they knew. I spent six months working side jobs, nights, weekends, whatever I could get, paying those people back. I lost weight. I couldn’t sleep. I thought my marriage was going to fall apart before it really even started and Raquel just kept saying we would figure it out and I kept not believing her but she was right.

My dad called me during that time. I was sitting in my truck outside a job site and I was too tired to go in and I answered the phone and I just told him everything. How I felt like a failure. How I felt stupid for trusting Ben. How I thought I had ruined everything before it started. And my dad, Curtis, who is not a man of many words, he just said “You didn’t fail. You trusted. That’s different. Now you know.”

That’s it. That’s what he said. And I sat in that truck and I didn’t cry but I wanted to and then I went inside and finished the job.

I worked for other companies for the next seventeen years. I rebuilt my reputation. I learned. I made mistakes. I installed a ceiling fan once without checking if the electrical box was fan-rated and it tore out of the ceiling at 2:47 in the morning and crashed onto the bed. The clients’ cat was traumatized. I paid for the repairs and a vet visit for “pet trauma” which I didn’t even know was a thing. I built a deck in Plano that wasn’t level and the client said “I didn’t order a koi pond” when it rained and water pooled in the center. I rebuilt it at my own cost and bought a Stabila level that I still have. I call it The Plano Reminder.

I tiled over old tile in my own bathroom once because I wanted to save time. Eleven months later the grout cracked and tiles started popping off and the subfloor was soft from water damage. Raquel made me sleep on the couch because I “smelled like mold.” She wasn’t wrong.

Mr. Davis passed away in 2012. I found out from someone I went to school with, saw it on Facebook or something, and I just sat there for a while. I hadn’t seen him in years. I meant to go back to Atlanta and visit him and I never did and then he was gone. I still have that jewelry box I made in his class. The lid still doesn’t close right. Anyway.

In 2017 I met David Shaw. He had this idea for a company that would help regular people stay on top of home maintenance. Not doing the work for them, not selling them things, just helping them remember what needs to be done and how to do it. I told him about the ceiling fan and the deck and the shower tiles and he said “that’s exactly why this needs to exist.” We started Homevisory.

David handles the tech side. The app, the website, the marketing, all of that. I handle the content. I write about how to take care of your home because I’ve spent thirty years learning how to do it and another thirty years learning what happens when you don’t. I live in Palm Beach now with Raquel and Peach, the older kids are grown, and I have two dogs named Sparkplug and Ratchet who follow me around while I fix things in the garage.

I’m fifty-one. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve learned from most of them. I still can’t fix cars. I fix houses, not Hondas. That’s what I tell people. My parents are still alive, both of them, elderly now, and I call my dad every Sunday after church. I’m on the worship team at our church, I play guitar, not well but well enough.

That’s who I am. That’s how I got here. I build things. I fix things. I try to help people avoid the mistakes I made, and when they make them anyway, I try to help them fix it.

That’s what we do here at Homevisory.