Amanda lives for finding meaning in the muck and at-homeness in a chaotic world. She was born a sensitive, thoughtful soul and has mostly traveled to great depths within herself and closer surroundings as opposed to extensively around the world in her almost 5 decades of life so far. However, she takes great interest in both inner and outer realms alike, especially in how they mirror each other. Her background is ecclectic, yet somehow everything she’s done seems to have revolved around looking at how people relate to their environments and striving for better harmony in that. 

The child of an artistic architect father and multicultural educator mother, she was raised in a home literally built around her and filled with interesting elements by both parents. As a kid growing up, Amanda could often be found crafting…working with her hands and intuition to make useful things for herself and others….or dreaming up and acting out theatrical performances with her friends. As a young adult, she pursued a variety of forms of education that eventually led to a B.A. in Geography (humans + land = spatial relationships). That path included a semester “on foot” traversing the wilderness of Utah’s Colorado Plateau for credit, summer jobs in a couple of western national parks (Yellowstone and Crater Lake), and an internship in Big Bend National Park that turned into a 4-year seasonal life as a trail maintenance worker there (more sculpting natural spaces to enable humans to connect with them). Amongst these educational steps towards a formal degree, there were also stints where Amanda returned to her hometown of Portland, OR to apprentice with her father the creative design-builder, learning the basics and nuances of all kinds of homecrafting skills and thus forming a strong foundation for her future career.

After completing college and getting swept away for a while in the unique and mysterious life of the Chihuahuan desert, Amanda came back to the Pacific Northwest to roost in the early 2000’s, thereby bringing an almost decade-long phase of nomadic early adulthood to a close. One of her first ventures as a returning permanent resident of Portland was to get a job as a deconstructionist (someone who dismantles buildings to harvest reusable materials) at The Rebuilding Center, which is where she got her footing in a number of ways…by learning about housing structures in reverse (taking them apart tells a lot about how they’re put together), getting keenly interested in the creative reuse potential of salvaged building materials, and meeting the young man who would become her partner in life, parenthood, business and laughter. Deconstructing houses side by side, Mike Pagliarulo and Amanda Ettinger (see what they did with their last names?) found and nurtured a spark that has evolved for over 2 decades into a solid relationship based on lasting shared values. 

Leaving the Rebuilding Center launched Mike and Amanda into a new phase of career development together. While cutting their remodeling teeth on their own houses (each had bought one in the same North Portland neighborhood as a singleton before becoming a couple), Mike also apprenticed under other local builders to cultivate practical carpentry and business skills, while Amanda did continuing education in Feng Shui and Yoga Teaching to cultivate esoteric skills and started building custom furniture from salvaged materials as a way to earn money from a creative outlet. By 2010 they had been married for 3 years, had seen what their combined creative skills could do to living spaces, and became ready to start their own business. Bright Spot Design-Build was thus born (named after what Mike affectionately called Amanda while working on the deconstruction crew) and became their vessel for bringing their resourceful home improvement passions to the world. 15 years later, they have a family (Moses and Meadow have been their brightest spots since 2013 and 2016, respectively) and an ever-deepening desire to fulfill their individual creative potentials while helping others to do the same in environments that feel personally comforting and inspiring.

Amanda’s best strengths continue to be the ones she was born with…sensitivity and creativity…and since these have also come with hardships like overwhelm, emotional dysregulation, and self-doubt, she is also quite experienced with working in therapy to deal with the obstacles to fully embracing her true self. Right now, she’s committed to pouring her creativity into the services she offers through Bright Spot, which are to help people connect with what really matters to them in life and design home space transformations that support those connections. Amanda is not a trained architect, obviously, but her innate sensitivity to environments, her self-taught skills in using Sketchup Pro to model the spatial design solutions she envisions, and her passion for world healing through inner peace make up for it. She feels fortunate to have a job doing what she loves, being creative and helping people, and looks forward to creating as much functional beauty around the neighborhood as she can.