Katharine MacPhail 00:10
You are listening to Talking Home Renovations with The House Maven. Is it time to renovate your house, but you’re worried that you don’t really know what you’re doing? This is an educational and entertaining podcast that will ease your fears. Or maybe you just love hearing about home renovations, like I do. I am your host Katharine MacPhail. I am an architect, and I practice in eastern Massachusetts. On the show, I interview other architects, vendors, contractors and homeowners to gather tips and stories about home renovations and learn about materials, systems, sustainable practices, what to expect, what to avoid, and how to make the most of the money that you’ll spend on your renovation. Today’s episode is a little bit different than usual. I happened to run across this interiors architect named Mark Ostrom, who’s doing really incredible work. I’m just gonna read to you about his business that he started. Founded in 2019 on a shoestring budget and backed by a career filled with colleagues, Mark officially launched Joy Collaborative. Joy Collaborative is a group of passionate doers and volunteers who help create spaces for kids with life limiting conditions. The spaces are created through partnerships with the architecture and interior design community, and financial donations from the corporate community. I’m just really impressed with what he does, and inspired to think about spaces a little bit differently. As he says, “Do things just a little bit better”. Listen to my conversation with Mark and see if you’re not also inspired.

Katharine MacPhail 01:41
Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark Ostrom 01:42
Thank you Katharine.

Katharine MacPhail 01:43
I appreciate you joining me. Can’t wait to hear more about what you’ve been doing with Joy Collaborative. I just saw it on your website, and just felt like I needed to talk to you about how it opens up more possibilities than we may think about on a day to day basis, either for people who have particular needs or just for the delight of all of us. So, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself and Joy Collaborative, and how that all came to be.

Mark Ostrom 02:07
Sure. Happy to be here, I hope we have a fun conversation around design and helping people. I think this will be a good time. So it’s kind of a long story – it’s probably taken me twenty some years to get to Joy Collaborative through my professional history and personal desires. Originally I went to school for music education, so for me it was all about watching kids succeed through the arts and really enjoying young people and watching them be creative. That didn’t really work out – there weren’t any jobs available when I was getting ready to graduate, so I looked at some other creative endeavors and decided that architecture/interiors was really where I wanted to be. I want to affect people, more that I want to affect what a building might look like on the outside. That intimate experience of our own space is what I was really interested in. What’s interesting is when I originally went to school my day job was working at the University of Minnesota in the cleft palate clinic, in the insurance office of all places. My job was to process claims for families with kids who had cleft palates. So, a cleft palate is when your upper lip doesn’t fuse – our clinic was very comprehensive in the services that we offered, everything from surgery to dental care to occupational behavioral therapy. So it was very, very expensive. I’ll get to Joy Collaborative here at the end of this, it’s the setup for it all. But anyway, dental and medical were refusing the claims, which to this day is still true. So my job was to be an advocate for these families, and I got really excited about it. To have them come in maybe once a quarter and be able to tell them, “hey, we got your $10,000 claim paid”, and they start crying – come to find out they just missed a mortgage payment, or they’ve got these other stresses around finance. In that position, you took the burden off of what is a very challenging process. So that stuck with me very deeply. A number of years ago, when Joy Collaborative was starting to become a thing, that was one of the legs of the stool. The other one was just passion around design, I was always a really creative kid. You know, my first true built design project was Rainforest Cafe here in Minnesota at the Mall of America, which hopefully most people have experienced in some form or fashion. It became a wildly successful property and is now owned by Disney. For me it wasn’t about the financial success, it was more about people going bananas about being taken out of their normal world and dumped into this very surreal experience. So to me, when I got kind of tired of…I’m sure, Katharine, you’ve run the highs and lows of architecture and the economy. I just said, “I want to have my hands on the steering wheel, what can I do?”. I got to the point in my career, having done retail projects like Mall of America, tons of commercial office space, and a lot of hospitality, where I was like “I’m missing the connection”. This empathy that I’ve got, I want to bring it more into an everyday experience. So I said okay, well, I’ve got friends in the design community who are really talented and they’re doing all this work for these public entities, but they’re not necessarily doing it for individual families. Having spent time in sales, and lots of happy hours with contractors and designers, I would talk to them afterwards about…like, okay, we just did this Feed My Starving Children event or whatever and it was a great experience, we can’t we can’t fault that organization, but it was so far removed from what I knew their skill sets to be. I would ask them, “if we could do something like Joy Collaborative, what’s your interest?”, and everybody’s hand would go up and they’d get really excited so I was like alright, let’s figure this out. So, baby steps. I started doing stuff just nights and weekends, reached out to Make A Wish and did some projects for them, which led to Shriners Hospital, then to Ronald McDonald House. And then I hit the pause button and said wait a minute, you’re onto something here – maybe this wants to be a business. So now Joy Collaborative is a nonprofit. We are going into year number two of doing creative spaces for kids with life limiting conditions – we partner with the local creatives in our community, contractors, interior designers, all the vendors to focus those creative energies onto youth that really need some help in conditions, areas, or programs that just don’t have the right facilities. We define life limiting as either someone with a medical condition, poverty, or homelessness. We’re working on a homeless teen crisis center here in Minneapolis, and some public facilities as well. So that’s kind of a long arc to your question, but it’s the lead up to what we’re doing now and I could not be more thrilled about what we have done and what’s coming ahead.

Katharine MacPhail 07:48
So, Joy Collaborative – you started about two years ago, and I’ve watched a few videos showing the families that you’ve helped. First of all, let’s just back up for a second to Rainforest Cafe. So you’d worked on the design of that whole experience?

Mark Ostrom 08:02
I mean it was a very large team, but I was part of that team yes.

Katharine MacPhail 08:06
That was so much fun to go to when my kids were young. Now it’s left our local mall, but yeah I appreciated it when it was there.

Mark Ostrom 08:14
It was fun. I am by no means a star, that vision was set up a long time ago. We were just about executing, so it was really about exploring materials. We were doing some crazy stuff, as you can imagine, to come up with some of the solutions there. One of my jobs was to research artificial products. So I, at the time, could have told you where the best fake bananas came from. I think they were probably from a sushi company in Japan. You know, it was fun, and it was highly creative. There was a story there, and there was education there, and it really became a destination. It still is – it’s the highest grossing restaurant property in Disney’s franchise. So it’s sticking true to that kind of vision. Obviously with Disney’s support, it’s pretty exciting to watch.

Mark Ostrom 08:17
Yeah, definitely, that was a fun place. So tell me about Kodiak.

Mark Ostrom 09:16
Kodiak is the name of the boy that we work with. He was sixteen at the time, he’s seventeen now. This project came in through Make A Wish. He was born with CHARGE Syndrome. I don’t recall what every letter in CHARGE stands for, but each one is for a different condition that he has. It’s a very complex condition. I think one in seven hundred people in the country have that diagnosis. He was cognitively delayed, with development maybe around four years old, as well as blind and deaf. So the question is, how do we create an experience for somebody who has such different sensory needs from you and I? Make A Wish actually came to me because the two previous designers had quit, which I found very offensive. I don’t know the reasons why. And I’m not out here to fault anybody, it’s a huge design challenge. How do you create a space that’s really safe and exciting for somebody who doesn’t have the same perception that we do? So I just said, there’s a reason I went to design school – I wanted the hard challenges. I can’t back away from this. So we were super lucky. Our design partners were Lifetime Fitness and Gardner Builders, which is one of the top contractors in the region. They just latched on to this project. It was very challenging, and stressful. He’s got a very interesting family dynamic – he’s got pets, he doesn’t have full bodily function, and he can’t communicate. So I mean, talk about a programming exercise in trying to get to that, but that was the core of what we needed to solve for was a multi-sensory room for him.

Katharine MacPhail 11:19
So how did you even start with that? I mean, like you said, it’s a big design challenge.

Mark Ostrom 11:25
He could express likes and dislikes, in different ways. And obviously the family knows him, they live with him. Part of what we do at Joy Collaborative is we bring people in who are experts in fields that are outside of the design practice. So we had people who were with the Deaf-Blind Association, people from the cognitive side, all kind of circling him and trying to figure out what was best. We put him in the middle of the circle, out from that are his parents, and then he had siblings as well. And we could not ignore the siblings, we could not give Kodiak all this great attention and what we knew would be an interesting design solution without bringing them into the discussion. And there were some great things that came out of that, about spaces to be together and spaces to be apart. Kodiak was monitored 24/7, there was always somebody with him. His house is locked from the inside so he cannot run away, which has happened, and you can imagine how scary that is. But, you know, to be a young person and having to watch your sibling for a good chunk of your life and not being able to get a break, that was something we wanted to work with. We wanted to have a space that was safe for him, that he could be in for a certain number of minutes or hours a day on his own. His dad just wanted a place where they could hang out together. Dad was a real outdoorsman. He wanted to do some physical stuff with Kodiak, however that could happen. He asked specifically for a slide. We deal with kids with autism as well, and this falls into that same bucket of people trying anything to help their kid. They will do anything and find any product, any material, that will hopefully provide some comfort. Kodiak’s mom was overwhelmed with the stuff that they had – they had a room designated for him, which was only 14 feet square, and it was exploding with stuff. It’s hard to create any kind of interesting space when we’re just trying to manage so much stuff. So we worked together to take a lot of that stuff out. We worked with Kodiak’s teachers to figure out what was meaningful for them, and give them specific space that they could work at. Like any normal project, we discuss ideas about what we can do to this space. And it had to be super durable, because he wasn’t always in control of his physical self. He would have accidents that were hard to clean, he would beat things up because he was frustrated. But he also could be really calm and affectionate. We wanted to be able to address those extremes of activity, provide materials that were durable, and also find places that were comfortable for himself and his family. Kodiak is his given name – Mom and Dad are big outdoors, Northern Minnesota people. So that northern woods kind of aesthetic is sort of what we kind of wrapped everything in. But it was all about how we can make flexible space, I didn’t want to give him something that was just fixed. Obviously, multisensory stimulus is going to be really important to him as he matures. So we took that very small footprint and carved out a space for his teachers – he’s got teachers who come to his room a couple times a week, so they had a dedicated lockable space to work with him at. We did include a slide, but we also lofted the space and created sort of a deck area. We also created a xylophone of sorts out of copper tubes – that’s a vibration thing, he was very into drums. We also did a number of hang points on the ceiling for various climbing pieces, as well as swings that can be detached. So that’s where he and Dad can hang out and do things that are physical.

Katharine MacPhail 15:30
That’s amazing. I have a couple questions.

Mark Ostrom 15:35
Good.

Katharine MacPhail 15:36
Was it all within the 14 by 14 room? Or did you have more space to work with?

Mark Ostrom 15:41
We had that room, and we had a closet that was originally designated for something else. I think they had other things in there, I can’t remember. But we ended up tricking that out to be sort of a sensory closet and storage because they had so much stuff. Although there’s plenty of storage in the room to alleviate that, we were able to use that space but essentially that what you see in that video is that space of 14 feet square.

Katharine MacPhail 16:09
How did you address the people who are watching him all the time, like the siblings? Obviously they could still play on the slides, and the hanging bars, and all that stuff.

Mark Ostrom 16:18
So yeah, we worked with the county and put Dutch doors on that room which originally had full full height doors. The new doors were lockable, and we extended the height. So that way, they started giving him 15 minutes at a time of just being by himself in that space so the kids could do something else and get a little bit of a break. Outside of that there are sensory walls in there that they will play with, and work together with him in the upper lofted area. There’s beanbags and other soft seating, so he’ll sleep up there, but then he’ll also cozy up with a sibling and just read a book.

Katharine MacPhail 17:00
Hmm. How long ago did you finish this project?

Mark Ostrom 17:02
We finished the project a year and a half ago. I have to say, the most powerful and rewarding aspect is when I talked to his dad last he was crying. He was very choked up, and he said they were now having friends over to Kodiak’s room. He’s never had friends over before.

Katharine MacPhail 17:20
That’s so nice. It kind of reminds me of the other one, Bennett’s party. I love that. I don’t know if you have time to talk about that a little bit too, but I love how that involved his friends and neighbors and people coming over and socializing. It’s so important. I mean that is a huge part of life, right?

Mark Ostrom 17:38
Well, I think we go fairly deep in the programming. This is very personal stuff. We’re talking about living experiences for people who have a lot of challenges. What’s so shocking – and you’ll appreciate this – is when we get done with the project and we’re interviewing the mom, she said one of her biggest fears is Ben not having any friends. That never came up in the initial conversations. Although we talked about social spaces, we didn’t really talk about the long lasting impressions of having friendships. And he lives on a block that has like nineteen kids, so they’re all traveling in a pack. His mom will tell me there are times they have to turn kids away from playing there, because it’s the hottest spot on the block now. And that’s pretty great. They have movie nights over there, and game nights too. It’s a very active space, and it’s also helping him academically.

Katharine MacPhail 18:42
Okay, so I’ve read about Bennett and watched the video, but why don’t you tell the audience about Bennett’s situation?

Mark Ostrom 18:48
Well, Bennett is a sweet kid. His smile will light up a room, anybody you meet would say the same thing. So he was a great client to work with. I call all of our youth clients, because that’s really what they are. He is 10 years old and has spina bifida, which means he’s restricted in his growth, or growing abnormally. He just came back from his eighteenth surgery. He’s got at least that many ahead of him in the next 10 years. So it’s very intense, with constant changes in how they need to address him physically. The real drive for Bennett Park was, as he gets older and his kids become faster than him or more mobile than him, he’s gonna default to a wheelchair. That’s normal behavior for people with spina bifida, because they can’t walk real fast. But his parents wanted to encourage muscle growth and physical activity for him that didn’t involve a chair. So everything we did in that space essentially revolved around what we could do to encourage him not to use that appliance. Again, we worked with people at Courage Kinney, which is his physical therapy group. We met with his teachers, parents, and grandparents, who are major caregivers for him and came up with this idea of a park. Bennett is a huge Twins fan, his goal in life is to be the manager of the Minnesota Twins. But we didn’t want to design the room so heavily to be just this one trick baseball thing. There are certainly baseball elements in there, and you’ll see that in the video, but it was about creating as much variety as possible. Like, can we do things that involve his siblings? Can we put in batting practice and things like that, that make you stand? Is there a whiteboard in there that they can do art projects on together? Are there collapsible tables and chairs that can be brought in, if they’d like to do art projects. There’s a huge display case in that room of all the different art projects that Bennett has done by himself or with his siblings, and all the backs of those cabinets are magnetic and whiteboards so they’re multifunction in that way. There are swings that are detachable in there, and other different kinds of things that he can do with his legs. There’s monkey bars – we’re working on getting him past the third one right now, he could only kind of hang there originally. And then there’s stairs. He really doesn’t like to do stairs, so we put a mini flight of stairs in there to encourage him to do that. We also have bleachers in there that are really comfortable, and allow people to watch movies or hang out together. I would say his favorite aspect is the Nerf gun wall, and he’ll encourage anybody in there to play with him. That’s a great way to play, without realizing what you’re doing.

Katharine MacPhail 21:51
Hmm, well that definitely sounds like that would be a great place for neighborhood kids to hang out. I can see why they want to be there all the time.

Mark Ostrom 21:58
Yeah, it can be a problem. Mom is very generous about it. There’s also a concession stand in there.

Katharine MacPhail 22:08
Well that’s too much, that’s over the top.

Mark Ostrom 22:13
Well, it was his sisters. They’re younger than him, and they like to play dress up and do kitchen type things. But also tying into the baseball thing, it was just natural.

Katharine MacPhail 22:22
No, it’s perfect. I’m just joking. What a great way for kids to come together. And now it turns out he’s too popular because of his space.

Mark Ostrom 22:33
That would be a great problem.

Katharine MacPhail 22:35
Yeah, that’s really great. What’s next? Do you have a certain number of projects a year?

Mark Ostrom 22:42
Well, it’s kind of organic. We did have a target this year of doing half a dozen, and I think we’ll hit that by the end of the year. And again, with people like Bennett, sometimes we have to take a pause because he’s got a surgery, or they’ve had a health setback, or there’s something happening in the family dynamic that has to pause. But looking ahead, we are splitting our projects 50% between individual families and 50% between nonprofit organizations that serve youth in the community. Up ahead of us, we are working on a homeless teen shelter called Bridge For Youth in Minneapolis that is really challenged with its space. It is not an exciting place for young people to go to, and there are kids coming from trauma that could really use a better space. Our pipeline is at overcapacity right now, we’ve got more people in line than we can service right now which is, unfortunately, a good problem to have. So we’re working with building up our team at Joy Collaborative to address that.

Katharine MacPhail 23:43
So how could homeowners see what you’ve done, to really enhance these spaces and make them perfect for the people who are in there, and be inspired for their own projects? What’s a lesson that homeowners could learn from your work?

Mark Ostrom 23:56
I get really frustrated when I hear people say “I’m not creative, I have no idea where to start”. I completely disagree with that. Creativity in some people is beaten out of them, and they don’t realize it. They are creative, it just may not be the way you and I think about, say, visual space, but they are creative in how they approach a problem. We’re living in a time right now where people are really stressed, and at the same time volunteering is super high. So I would say, like a startup, bootstrap whatever your project is. Reach out to your friends and family, find an organization that you think might be able to help you. It depends on what problem it is you’re trying to solve. You don’t have to create a joint collaborative type room, but you can do something small. If you’re a family with limited means, there are people out there who can help you. I am not one to go out and ask for money and things, but I’m telling you, once you start and you get a reaction from people it’s like an avalanche. You will see things happening. If, say, you need to create a sensory board that slips under your couch because you don’t have a lot of space, people will get you things and help put it together. If you need special products, put a Kickstarter together and share it with your friends. There are easy ways to do this that don’t really cost you any money. If it becomes more complicated, and you get something that’s headed toward a joy room, that’s a little bit different. At that point you’d probably want somebody like you, Katharine, helping to lead that charge and coordinate all that. But there are many ways to skin a cat. I say reach out to your creative friends and start there.

Katharine MacPhail 25:51
Well, that’s really inspiring. I don’t want to say I’m not a creative person, but I feel like that would be a very difficult design problem. Really exciting though, possibly more exciting than the typical work that I do because it’s addressing particular needs that people have. The idea of having a safe sensory environment is pretty exciting.

Mark Ostrom 26:15
People will often say, “oh, we don’t have space”. Well, we can carve out a space in a living area. We can do that. If you’re lucky and you’ve got a closet in a bedroom, hey, let’s start there. Let’s call it a room, empty it out, and find a place for that stuff because this is going to be a really important space to use. If you’ve got a double closet, that’s a huge bonus. Start with the experiences and the emotions you want to try to capture and start there. If your kids are really sensitive to acoustics, yeah there are headphones, but there’s also blankets you can tack up in there. If storage is an issue, talk to IKEA and see what they’ve got in their discount space. There are ways to be creative here, and if you’re lucky enough to know an architect or interior designer, reach out to them, because they’ve got a lot of resources that are going to be beyond anything you’ve ever known about.

Katharine MacPhail 27:13
That’s good advice. People are wanting to help other people, especially right now. It’s a stressful time, and I think people feel better when they’re helping other people.

Mark Ostrom 27:24
It’s human nature to want to help somebody else. In general, that is the case. I read an article the other day from Forbes that anxiety is higher than it’s ever been, and a great way to offset anxiety is to help somebody else.

Katharine MacPhail 27:40
That’s definitely true.

Mark Ostrom 27:41
Or reach out for help. I would say once you get some ideas going, reach out to me and we can figure stuff out. Journal that, or put a whiteboard up. There’s an autism tracker where you can track moods throughout a month and see if there’s a correlation between what intervention you’ve created and see if there’s an effect. You know, sensory…I’m just going to talk about autism for a second, because that’s an area we’re going to start working a little bit more in. I’m just not a big fan of one trick devices, and there are catalogs that are an inch thick of sensory devices for kids with autism. A lot of those are, you know, maybe a tube filled with water that has bubbles in it. Which can definitely reset a mood, but there are many ways to get that same reaction. There are these fantastic little portable projectors, which you can attach to your laptop and other apps, giving you an infinite number of options. I also talk to folks about the ceiling in our spaces – the ceiling is our greatest asset. If there’s a way to use that $50 projector to project cool things onto the ceiling, you don’t have to go out and buy these super expensive twinkle light pads that’ll cost you $2,000 for a bedroom. So again it’s this idea about creativity. Don’t just do the default solution, see if you can think outside the box a little bit.

Katharine MacPhail 29:28
I love the way you think Mark.

Mark Ostrom 29:30
Thank you.

Katharine MacPhail 29:31
I just love these projects, so.

Mark Ostrom 29:35
I don’t know if it started at Rainforest Cafe, that was a long time ago. But through my whole design career I’ve always said, “is that the best we can do?” That really came into play when I was doing hotel work, because I would always joke about how they wanted amazing looking things and we had to stretch a nickel. They had no budget, and wanted amazing. So how can we do better? How can we be creative? At Joy Collaborative, I’m not interested in a paint sticker solution. There are certainly people out there who will do that, and they mean well. But for us I’d rather get a functional solution, and we’re not going to get at that using that approach.

Katharine MacPhail 30:16
Right. Yeah, paint and stickers, you could do better.

Mark Ostrom 30:20
Always.

Katharine MacPhail 30:20
Yeah, always. So how can people learn more about your work or get in touch with you?

Mark Ostrom 30:25
Our website, Joy Collaborative dot org. It’s where you’ll find all the latest and greatest. You’ll see a Joy Rooms tab, which has videos of the projects we’re doing. There are a couple new ones coming up before the end of the year. We’re doing one that I’m super excited about, which is a very cool sensory room for a boy who’s quadriplegic and cognitively delayed. We’re also doing a meditation relaxation space for Ronald McDonald House here in Minneapolis. Both those projects should be done by this year, So, Joy Collaborative dot org is where you’re gonna want to read about our projects. The other fun thing that we did, kind of taking an atypical approach, is we had our first ever fundraiser a week ago. We knew it wasn’t going to be in a hotel ballroom at tables of eight or ten, eating chicken and wild rice. That just was not our style – the Joy brand is really about design, fun, and creativity. And that experience is not any one of those. So we turned it into more of a social hour and, again, reached out to the creative community and had an event that we called ‘Barkitecture’. Barkitecture isn’t a new idea, we did not come up with this by any means. But marrying it to a nonprofit was a new idea. So we had a number of these cat and dog houses that were all unique and custom built by interior designers, architects, and contractors that were auction items for us. And then we wrapped a whole experience around that. We did very well, we had a great response and are already looking at planning Barkitecture 2022, which I’m really excited about.

Katharine MacPhail 32:20
Yeah, that is exciting. I was saying, when we were talking about it earlier, that you could sell those. You could just produce some cat and dog furniture. People who own cats and dogs spend a ridiculous amount of money on them, a lot of the time.

Mark Ostrom 32:33
Yes, they do. It was fun to see how people reacted to them. I do think in the world of cat and dog furniture, there is a void of creativity.

Katharine MacPhail 32:43
Yes, definitely.

Mark Ostrom 32:46
But it really taps in on the larger strategy for Joy Collaborative. I am new to the nonprofit world, but I’ve read enough about the typical path, and again I got a little frustrated. I said, “Why is it that we have to be so reliant on fundraising? Why can’t we create our own revenue streams?” And so next year, we’ll be exploring – whether it’s dog and cat furniture or something else, there will be other ways for us to provide more Joy rooms and help more kids faster by looking at alternative ways of financial growth.

Katharine MacPhail 33:30
Yeah, that makes total sense. Because then you have a steady stream that you can rely on, and you spend more time doing the work you need to do and less time on the fundraising aspect.

Mark Ostrom 33:39
And it’s different exposure too, different ways of getting at people. I love this work. The tragedy is our funnel will never be dry. And we do things in such a…I don’t want to say great, I shouldn’t be patting myself on the back. But we do great projects.

Katharine MacPhail 34:01
You do great projects, I’ll pat you on the back.

Mark Ostrom 34:02
Thank you. But I mean, why can’t this grow? There’s no reason this can’t grow. One of the things that motivated me into this was working with Make A Wish, because they don’t typically do projects like this. Their model, at least in Minnesota, is sending people on a great vacation or break away, or introducing a celebrity type person to these kids. That’s great to create those moments, but we have kids who that isn’t really as relevant or is beneficial for. So, I know that we can help more kids.

Katharine MacPhail 34:44
That’s great. Well, thank you for the work you do Mark.

Mark Ostrom 34:47
Thanks for the chat.

Katharine MacPhail 34:48
Yeah, it’s been fun. It’s great to meet you. I have one very irrelevant question : did any dogs or cats try out the furniture?

Mark Ostrom 34:57
Yes actually, we got a couple photographs. One was my new friend Bentley, who is a little toy poodle who was in our wine barrel…what was it called…Le Chardonnay Stay was made from a wine barrel. So yes they’ve tried it out, I’ve gotten some nice photographs from family showing us.

Katharine MacPhail 35:15
No, it’s great. I always get drawn in by pet things. But you know, the work that you do for the kids, you can’t even put a value on it. So it’s great that you’re doing that.

Mark Ostrom 35:24
Thank you. Yeah, it’s wonderful. I have trouble sleeping sometimes because I get so excited about what we do. But you know, we’re a growing organization so it’s great to hear your comments and to know there are people out there who can track along. To your audience, if they see something here and if they’ve been touched by disability or issues that we deal with, we certainly can…we love our sustaining members, we’d like to do something special for them, but even just following along and sharing our content as it’s developed is is super helpful for for a young but growing organization.

Katharine MacPhail 36:02
Yeah, well, I wish you the best with that.

Mark Ostrom 36:04
Thank you.

Katharine MacPhail 36:07
Well, I am genuinely inspired by Mark’s work and how he’s really helping people. He’s helping the world be a better place. So thank you, Mark. And thank you for listening. All of the links to everything are in the show notes. Everything you could ever want to know – about this podcast anyway – can be found on my website Talking Home Renovations dot com. Transcripts, episode enhancements, a link to my mailing list, a free download, and all my social media links. I hope you love this podcast and tell your friends all about it.

Katharine MacPhail 36:38
This podcast is now a part of Gabl Media, which is the largest AEC network on the planet. So go check out the other podcasts and videos. They’re actually really great, so go check them out at Gabl Media dot com. That’s G A B L M E D I A dot com. This show is a production of my architecture firm Demios Architects, where we believe architects are for everyone. Here in Massachusetts, I have an Ask An Architect design helpline where I can help you with whatever you’re stuck on or give you architectural advice. I love hearing from people. So get in touch, and also join my facebook group Talking Home Renovations Together, because we have previous guests on the show. We have architects, a lot of other homeowners, and I’m hoping that will be a lively community where we can all explore different topics together. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, take care.