The person behind the channel.

My name is Santi Castillo. In 2022, my wife and I moved from the US to Sweden. After two and a half years in an apartment, we bought a house in the countryside. It needed more work than we expected. That's where this channel comes from.

By day I'm a product designer with a degree in art—drawing, painting, digital work—which means I come to woodworking and DIY with a strong sense of how things should look, but almost no idea how to actually build them. That gap is kind of the whole point.

On the one hand, I could hire professionals to do all of this. On the other hand:

• The house is what it is, and we want to make it ours. Not every job can be hired out—and the ones that can be, I'd rather do myself.
• I genuinely enjoy it. Designing around real constraints, researching what I don't know, then actually making the thing—there's a satisfaction to that which is hard to find elsewhere. Especially when it works.
• My brain won't leave a problem alone once it's noticed one. I tend to see when something is designed suboptimally, and once I've seen it I need to fix it. Having a workshop and a 3D printer means I can build custom solutions that fit exactly right—and ideally look like they belong there.

Other Hand DIY is the documentation of all of that. The planning, the mistakes, the things that work better than expected and the things that absolutely don't. No gatekeeping, no pretending I know what I'm doing before I do.