The Story Behind Sandmark
Chapter Three: From Sam & Amanda’s POV
When people hear that our parents have owned a business together for thirty years, they usually focus on the business part.
Sam and I tend to think about the together part.
Our parents have worked together, lived together, raised two kids together, weathered the good years and the difficult ones together—and after more than thirty years, they still genuinely enjoy being together. As an adult, that might be one of the things I find most remarkable about their story.
There was never much separation between Sandmark and our family when we were growing up. The business wasn’t somewhere Mom and Dad went in the morning and left at five o’clock. It was woven into our everyday life.
Some of our earliest memories of the Outer Banks aren’t exactly glamorous ones. Sam remembers living on the oceanfront in South Nags Head in a house without windows, air conditioning or heat. I remember being in that same beach house during a hurricane and hearing Mom and Dad worry that the roof—or possibly the whole house—might not make it. Somehow, those were the beginnings of the life they were building here.
And then there were the job sites.
As kids, we watched empty lots become homes. First there would be nothing. Then a cleared lot. Pilings. Framing. Open walls. Drywall. And eventually, a finished house that somehow looked nothing like the messy construction site we had been walking through for months.
Renovations were even harder for us to understand. We would walk into an older house with an awkward layout, and I could never quite see whatever Dad was already picturing in his head. Then months later, we would come back and I would be completely blown away. Every single time. There was something fascinating about watching an idea that existed only in someone’s imagination—or maybe on a napkin—become a home people would actually live their lives in.
Sam looks back on those years a little differently. What stands out to him now is how much he learned simply by being around it all. At the time, tagging along to job sites was just part of being our parents’ kids. Only later do you realize how many skills, lessons and little bits of knowledge you absorbed without ever knowing you were learning them.
Owning a family business meant our childhood was probably a little different. Vacations could be different. Schedules could be unpredictable. There was always something happening.
But somehow, Mom and Dad were also always there.
They worked constantly, yet I cannot remember feeling like their work was more important than we were. They were at our practices, games and events. They were on the sidelines cheering, and plenty of times they were on the field coaching. Dad coached Amanda in track and field—where they even competed in some of the same events—and served as a Boy Scout troop leader for Sam. Looking back now that we have families of our own, we understand how difficult that balance must have been, and how intentional they had to be to make it look as normal as it did to us.
They made it seem effortless.
Some of the things they taught us had absolutely nothing to do with building houses.
We learned that being busy is never an excuse not to check on someone who needs you. There is always enough time to pick up the phone, drop off a meal or show up for a friend. We learned that no matter what your title is, how successful you become or how many people work for you, you are never too important to pick up a piece of trash or take the garbage out.
Mostly, we learned by watching.
We watched Dad work hard, stay determined and care deeply about getting things right. We watched Mom nurture relationships, take care of people and become the steady, dependable presence behind both our family and the business. Sam describes Dad as hardworking, determined and loyal, and Mom as caring, hardworking and loving. My words aren’t very different: hardworking, dedicated and caring for Dad; nurturing, genuine and dependable for Mom.
But maybe what we watched most closely was their relationship.
I think about it often now.
They spend nearly every day together; they have made thousands of decisions together. They’ve undoubtedly disagreed about houses, schedules, money, employees, clients, us, and probably what they were having for dinner. They raised a family while trying to grow a young company in a place where they were still creating a life for themselves.
And somehow, through all of it, they have remained partners in every sense of the word.
That doesn’t mean everything was perfect. It means they kept showing up—for the business, for other people, for us and for each other. In doing that, they taught us how to work through disagreements, setbacks and failures, and how much communication matters when you’re building a life with someone else.
As children, you don’t necessarily recognize how special that is. You assume family dinners happen because dinner happens; you assume your parents will be at the game because they’re your parents; you assume the house will eventually get finished because Dad says it will.
Then you grow up.
You have careers and spouses and children and schedules of your own, and suddenly you understand how much work goes into creating the things that once seemed effortless.
One of the things I appreciate most now is something incredibly ordinary: all of us sitting around the table together. Breakfast or dinner, more often than not, we ate as a family. It’s something I probably barely noticed then and something I value enormously now.
Sam says one of the things he appreciates most now is simply that we got to grow up at the beach. And he’s right. What felt normal to us was actually pretty extraordinary.
The Outer Banks was our playground, but it was also the place where we watched our parents build something from nothing.
And Sandmark was never only about houses.
Our parents care deeply about the people who will eventually live inside them. These homes become places where children grow up, where families gather for holidays, where people begin retirement, become empty nesters, welcome grandchildren and move into entirely new chapters of their lives. Mom and Dad have always understood that they’re being trusted with something much bigger than lumber, tile and floor plans.
Maybe that’s why the word family has always fit Sandmark so well.
It describes how Mom and Dad built the company. It describes how they treat the people they work with. And it describes what Sam and I were fortunate enough to grow up surrounded by.
Thirty years later, there are hundreds of houses up and down the bypass and Beach Road that we could point to and say, “Hey, Dad built that house.” But from our perspective, the most important thing our parents built was never a house.
It was a life.
A family. A marriage. A reputation. A community of people they care about. And a business that somehow became intertwined with all of it.
When Sam was asked what he would tell Mom and Dad now, his answer was simple: he wouldn’t change a thing about the way we were raised.
Mine is just as simple:
Thank you.
For our childhood and the example you set. For showing us what hard work looks like, but also what showing up for people looks like — and for teaching us that success means very little if you don’t have people beside you to share it with.
And, most of all, thank you for raising us into the adults, spouses, parents and friends we are today.
— Amanda