"The area that I grew up in is different from what people expect when they hear ‘Southern California’. We were cilantro and strawberry fields for as far as the eye could see, full of hard working people with Southern hospitality in a constant hustle to grow and get by.
I was raised by my mom after my dad left. We had nowhere to go, so we pretty much lived out of the back of a pickup truck for a year and a half. I still have a hard time eating peanut butter and jelly because it brings me back to that pickup truck. We ended up in Ventura County, just far enough away from our previous life to start over. I was raised by my hardworking mom, and that gave me a vision of what it takes to succeed or to have drive and everything else.
I graduated high school and then moved to Portland, Oregon for a year selling cars. I moved back to California, but didn’t know what I was doing with myself. At one point, my mom worked on a Navy base reconditioning missile canisters, so I decided to join the military.
The Air Force made me grow up. It gave me self-awareness and a feeling like I was part of something. It took someone like me, from a broken household, and gave me a clean slate and a ‘You can do this.’ It was a group of individuals that pushed me and sent me down the right path. It allowed me to go places, see other cultures, and learn how to get along with people.
My wife and I met while we were stationed in Louisiana. She ended her enlistment and became a stay-at-home-mom, and that’s when we started thinking about what our long-term plans were going to be. We decided we didn’t want to raise our kids in the military, so the next question became moving to where I was from—LA and all the craziness —or Bay City, where my wife and family were from and involved in the community.
The answer seemed obvious, so in 2019, we moved to Bay City.
I've always had the ability to sell things and connect with people, so when we moved to Bay City, I decided to try and sell cars. I’m a Jeep nut, so selling Jeeps was going to be my thing. I worked over at Garber on Bay Road, which was awesome. I met a lot of really awesome people there, but they already had a ‘Jeep Guy’. He’s still there and a good friend of mine. But this was a local, competitive market I didn’t know how to play in, so I needed to find something else.
The other thing I’ve been able to do is build things, so the idea was to start out doing small remodeling jobs and build from there. It was a scary, all-on-me moment, especially because we had two kids and were pregnant at the time.
It was a big, risky decision, but we said, ‘Let’s do it.’
I think the first custom bathroom remodel I did, when all was said and done, I made something like $2 an hour. I ended up having to redo the joists underneath that were rotting. It was an absolute disaster.
But I loved the challenge remodeling gives and I love making a change that has an impact on people, so I kept going and started Seven Slot Remodeling.
Some people can afford to have a house built exactly how they want it from the start.
But some people live in a house for 30 years: it’s where they’ve raised their family, where their kids have grown up and moved out. It’s a home, but with a space that is no longer functional for them, and I get to make it better by redoing a bathroom or knocking down walls and making them love their house again. Not just anybody can go and create an emotional feeling like that.
You spend a couple weeks in someone’s house with their dog greeting you every day, and customers become like family.”
– Joshua Freedman, Seven Slot Remodeling LLC
