Today on The Mag we have Jason Meyers of Dads by Design. Jason and his husband Brian are DIY-ers who chronicle life with their adorable two year-old daughter while renovating their Salt Lake City home. Learn more about Jason and his family, how they started Dads By Design (spoiler alert: it’s a crazy story), their adoption journey and much more!

Dads By Design Jason Myers and Brian Nicholls

Introduce yourselves and family. How did you meet?

We first met in 2010 at a Salt Lake County Democratic Party County Convention (we're a political family!) and were friends before we started dating. We bought our first house together in 2014, got engaged in the Tower of Terror at Walt Disney World in 2015, and got married at Snowbasin Ski Resort in Utah on June 4, 2016. Two years later, we adopted a baby girl, Sydney, who was born on our two year wedding anniversary, June 4, 2018.

What inspired you to start @DadsByDesign account? And what is it about DIY projects that you love?

We started the account when we bought our second house in 2016. We had done several DIY projects on our first house before we sold it and received a lot of compliments from realtors and prospective buyers about the design when we sold it that we'd wished we'd logged everything we'd done. Since our second home was also a fixer-upper, we started an account to keep track of our projects. Although not every project is perfect, we have stressful moments just like every couple, we enjoy seeing the fruits of our labor in our home and knowing our home was put together by us. Designing and finishing Sydney's nursery was, and still is, our favorite project we've ever done. It was such a great project for us to remodel that room together as a couple and prepare for her arrival into our family.

When did the two of you know that you were ready to grow your family?

We'd always talked about having kids, even before we were married. However, after we got married in 2016, we started more aggressively planning and saving for a family. We met with a lawyer in 2017 to investigate the adoption process and started looking into adoption agencies. In that meeting, our lawyer told us, "the best advice I can give you is to tell everyone you know you want to start a family through adoption because you never know who you might know." We literally laughed at that advice. However, it worked for us. In December 2016, we received a text message from a close friend who said, "I know a teenage girl who is pregnant and looking to place her baby with a gay couple. Are you interested in meeting her?" To make a long and wonderful story short, that teenage girl ended up being our daughter's birth mom.

What are some ways that parents can incorporate LGBTQIA+ inclusivity within their families?

We love books. Sydney's rainbow bookshelves (which we made) are our favorite aspect of her room, and children's books are one way we're teaching Sydney about all types of families. Another way would be to include diverse art in your home and showcase all kinds of people so that your child is exposed to that kind of diversity in your home before they're exposed to it in the "real world."

Are you comfortable sharing anything about your adoption journey with us? Would you encourage others to foster/adopt? Would you do it again?

Of course. Our experience was amazing. After we were introduced to our future birth mother via that text message exchange, we met with her, and she selected to place her baby with us a few months later. The following few months were such an incredible bonding time. We were able to get to know Sydney's birth mom, attend her doctor's appointments, and be there for her birth, which is rare for a lot of adoptive parents. It really has been an incredible journey so far with so many people invested in and rooting for Sydney. That's really all you want as an adoptive parent. We consider ourselves adoption advocates now and are considering expanding our family through adoption again. That's actually the reason we're working on our next, rather large home project. We're starting to renovate the entire basement in our home so that we have room to potentially add another child to our family. We're hoping to start demolition and work on the basement in the next couple of weeks!

Name some other small businesses/brands that you love.

We love our Monte Design rocker! Sydney has the cutest Pink Linen Designs custom pennant in her nursery and while not in the design space, Stride Rite shoes are fantastic for toddlers!

Anything else you’d like to add?

The reason we moved from our first house to our second is actually crazy and one you might find interesting. In October 2016, shortly before Halloween, we heard some rustling in the backyard around 6 a.m. in the morning, and Ellie, our Goldendoodle, was acting strangely - running around the house at high alert. We went into the backyard to investigate to see if there was anything going on, and we caught a man trying to rob our shed. He then chased us out of our backyard with a machete. It was as scary as it sounds. We just couldn't feel safe in that house anymore, so we sold it and moved to a different neighborhood in Salt Lake City.

And finally, where can we find you?

Website: dadsbydesign.com
Instagram/social: @dadsbydesign on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest (and we also barely just started a TikTok page with one video, haha!)