Meet Mindy Otten-Chen

Ultimately I always attribute the root inspiration of me becoming a carpenter to a memory I had as a child going with my parents to site meetings as my childhood home was being built. There was an older kid on site who was probably the foreman’s son that was assigned to watch me while the adults talked. He showed me a nail and hammer and let me tinker a little. I realized that they were building my house and that I could also someday build a home with my own hands.

I was inspired to start Handymin Help for a few reasons.

1. There are not enough Women-owned building trades businesses.
2. There are so many types of folks who get discouraged from a career path in the trades, and I wanted an outlet to be able to coach them in both the hard and soft skills required to succeed.
3. The skills gap is real which means that homeowners are having a harder and harder time finding quality trustworthy professionals to help them with their projects.

I think I use problem solving more than any other skill. Sometimes that means finding cost saving solutions for a client that has a dream with a budget. And other times that means diagnosing something that is broken and coming up with different ways to fix it. The beauty of carpentry is being able to make something imperfect look perfect, and I think the main skill required to do that is problem solving.

I belong to a few Facebook groups that support women who want to learn a trade. I offer as much advice as I can in the comments. But being in the groups I realized that I would love to be able to do more of it in person, so I’m hoping to make that one of the main focuses of my business soon. I met one person for coffee to offer career advice and found out recently that they applied to go to carpentry school, so I call that a win.

I am really enjoying learning the business side of the trade although it can be overwhelming at times.

These days I think all my home time is dedicated to the ultimate DIY project, my 9mo old baby, haha. It would be a dream to own something in NYC one day and fix it up for myself.

I can be like MacGyver with my utility knife. I mean I love all of my tools and can’t live without any of them, they each have a special use, but I will say that the oscillating multi tool is definitely one of the most versatile tools you can have with you.

Pre-pandemic I would go to the climbing gym and eat my way around NYC. These days my biggest hobby is hunting for vintage finds and reselling them.

Shout out to my good friend Mary Webb who I went through carpentry school with, is always great to talk shop with and is working on starting her own historic window restoration business in Montana.