How House of Blueprint Came to Me
Written by Erin Bakker
I have never had a particularly straight career path, and for a long time I thought that might be something I needed to explain away. Now I think it may be the whole point. I started my career in early childhood education and taught at Destin Elementary. At the time, there was no art program, and I remember thinking that was just unacceptable. So I started building art into my regular classroom in a really intentional, cross-curricular way. It got attention, but more importantly, I saw how much kids responded to creativity when they were actually given access to it.
That eventually led me to Abrakadoodle, a children’s art education franchise that I owned for eight years. It grew into one of the top five franchises in the system, and thousands of local children came through our programs. That business taught me a lot, but one lesson has followed me through everything I have done since: if something should exist and it doesn’t, sometimes you just have to figure out how to build it.
After Abrakadoodle, I started The Hive Creative Consulting with my business partner, Ali Weil. The best way I can describe The Hive is that we were willing to take on just about anything. Brand strategy, events, social media, websites, design, PR, content, business development, consulting. Every client was different, and that was exactly what we loved about it. Over the life of the business, we worked with more than 75 companies, including Rosemary Beach and the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Emerald Coast. There were so many entrepreneurs in our area with good ideas who simply needed a creative team to help take those ideas from a thought to something real. Ali and I had great synergy, we loved the work, and we were not afraid to figure things out as we went.
Contractors Connect was actually born under The Hive. At the time, I was doing the marketing for my husband’s company, Specialty Roofers, and I was frustrated. We were doing what businesses were “supposed” to do, but I wasn’t finding much that actually moved the sales needle. Around that same time, my brother-in-law told me about an informal little group of six general contractors in Nashville who met at a bar every Thursday afternoon, talked through problems, bounced ideas off one another, and learned from each other. I remember thinking, we need something like that here.
Then COVID happened, and like so many people, Ali and I had to rethink what we wanted work and life to look like. We decided The Hive needed a break. Rather than simply shutting everything down, we transitioned our clients to work directly with members of our team and stepped away for a while to focus on our families.
Eventually, though, I got the itch again. I started Beespoke Consulting with Sarah White, who had been my Director of Public Relations at The Hive. Not long after that, the opportunity came to bring Contractors Connect back with the support of Builders FirstSource. And it took off like sweet potato vine. We added Lindsay Lord to our partnership and grew, grew, grew.
Contractors Connect grew from that idea into membership, events, partnerships, multiple counties, podcasting, media, and eventually two projects that completely changed my direction: Blueprint Magazine and Mini Reno. Those were our first truly consumer-facing projects, and I fell in love. Blueprint let me talk directly to the homeowner, not just about construction, but about the people behind the spaces. The artists. The makers. The builders. The objects. The gardens. The stories. The little choices that make a home feel like somebody actually lives there. I really started to like that.
Recently, I made the decision to step away from Contractors Connect and take Blueprint and Mini Reno with me to build something new. That something became House of Blueprint. And in a strange way, House of Blueprint feels less like a new business and more like the place where all the previous versions of me finally get to live together.
I am an entrepreneur to my core, but I could also be perfectly happy spending the day cooking, sewing new throw pillow covers, homeschooling, gardening, crafting, thrifting, antiquing, organizing a closet, redesigning a room, or making gifts for people I love. A dear friend has called me the “Coastal Woman” for years, playing off the Pioneer Woman, and honestly, it fits. I love homemaking, and I don’t mean that in a narrow decorating sense. I mean everything that happens in a home. The meals. The messes. The kids. The projects. The collections. The traditions. The flowers. The repairs. The books. The weird little things you pick up at an antique store and somehow have to find a place for.
House of Blueprint is a celebration of all of that through storytelling, color, quirk, and creativity. I am also largely self-taught, and I am proud of that. I truly believe almost anything can be learned and mastered if you are curious enough to keep asking questions and willing enough to keep trying. I am a research-aholic. If something inspires me, I want to know everything about it. How it works. Who does it well. Why it matters. Whether I can learn to do some version of it myself.
That curiosity has allowed me to move between education, art, consulting, construction, publishing, media, and now this. I have also learned that success does not always mean holding onto something forever. There have been times when I have passed a thriving project or business to someone else because I could feel another creative itch starting. That used to feel reckless. Now I think it has kept my work fresh and, more importantly, kept me happy.
Everything I have built has also been shaped around my family. I wanted a career that allowed me to sit in carpool lines, stand on sidelines, volunteer at school, homeschool when we needed to, and still build things I cared deeply about. I wanted my children to grow up seeing creativity as something normal, something useful, something worth making time for. That is part of why
projects like The Post Room mean so much to me. They are not separate from my work. They are part of the same life.
I am originally from Atlanta, and media has always been somewhere in my family story. My grandfather, Richard McGinnis, was part of the small team that helped start Turner Broadcasting. My dad later became Senior Vice President of Sales at Turner, and my mom worked there in marketing before I was born. So maybe media was always sitting quietly in the background.
But Santa Rosa Beach is home. I moved here in my twenties after Auburn, married a Destin native, raised my family here, and have now spent more than 20 years building businesses, friendships, projects, and a life on the Emerald Coast. I know this community well, and I love it deeply. But I also believe House of Blueprint can grow beyond it because the idea at the center of it is not really local.
Home matters. Creativity matters. The things people make with their hands matter. The stories behind the spaces we live in matter.
And I want to keep learning about all of it.
That is really what House of Blueprint is for.
Erin
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