The Interview That Changed Something for Me

Written by Erin Bakker

A couple of months ago, we filmed our very first Blueprint’s Best interview for Blueprint Magazine.

It was with Sarah Stein, of Sarah Stein Homes, and we shot it inside a house she was building on the north side of the Choctawhatchee Bay. The house was still framed up, sitting on a sleepy little gravel road in Freeport with this gorgeous view out toward the water.

I had done plenty of talking into microphones before. I co-hosted Trade Talk through Contractors Connect, I have emceed more events than I can count, and I have spent years sitting across from business owners, customers, contractors, and people with interesting stories.

But I had never really done an interview quite like this one.

Something clicked

The conversation with Sarah just flowed.

I was not trying to get through a predetermined list of questions or waiting for my turn to talk. I was listening to her story and following it wherever it went. One answer would make me think of another question, and then another, and suddenly we were somewhere completely different than I expected us to be.

I loved it.

And I think we got a really good story out of it.

People will get to read that story when Blueprint Magazine comes out in February 2027, but for me, something else happened that day too.

I realized I really love interviewing people.

Not interviewing for the sake of producing a piece of content. I love figuring out what is interesting about somebody, asking enough questions to get past the obvious answer, and finding the piece of the story that another person might connect with.

That interview sent my creative brain in about a thousand directions.

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I think that was the week I figured it out

Somewhere around that time, I started realizing how much I loved this world I had stumbled into.

Production. Publishing. Interviews. Photography. Storytelling. Figuring out how one conversation could become a magazine feature, a video, a social post, an idea for something completely new.

I wanted to do it all day.

That was a pretty significant realization because Contractors Connect had been my world since I founded it in 2017. But Blueprint Magazine and Mini Reno had started pulling me in a different direction. They were the two projects under Contractors Connect that were really built for the consumer, and that was increasingly where I wanted to be.

A few months later, I made the decision to break away from Contractors Connect and put my full focus on Blueprint Magazine and everything growing around it.

House of Blueprint came next.

In a way, it was the obvious home for all of it.

Blueprint Magazine lives here. Mini Reno lives here as we continue developing the renovation-show concept we first piloted earlier this year. And now there are all of these other ideas growing around them, because apparently giving my creative brain its own house was a dangerous thing to do.

And now this is what I get to do

I get to look for interesting stories.

Then I get to figure out the most interesting way to tell them.

Sometimes that means sitting in a half-built house overlooking the bay and asking a builder why she does things the way she does. Sometimes it is a photograph, a renovation, a garden, a recipe, a piece of art, a conversation, or an idea that deserves more attention than it is getting.

And the audience is not some vague demographic sitting on the other side of a marketing plan.

It is people living in houses.

Homemakers. Homeowners. First-time buyers trying to figure out what they are doing. New moms creating a home around a completely different life. Empty nesters figuring out what comes next. Young adults who suddenly have a mortgage and

are wondering how they became responsible for gutters.

Real people making homes and lives.

I think that is the part I had been looking for without knowing I was looking for it.

Sarah Stein’s interview was simply the first time I could see it clearly.

I walked into a framed house in Freeport to film the first interview for a magazine.

I walked out thinking, I want to keep doing this.

And now I do.