Heath Peterson was at the end of his rope.

He was dealing with a difficult divorce, the death of a loved one. Here he was at 45, alone during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. It seemed like the world was collapsing on top of him.
In times like this, people find the core of who they are. They look back on their life and try to figure out how they ended up here, and what else might have been.

Heath reflected on when he was most happy. It was during his high school summers, when he teamed up with a realtor who owned tract housing in the area. There was an endless supply of homes that needed painting.

“I was constantly painting empty homes, and that was so relaxing,” Heath remembers. “I put my earbuds in, and nobody bothered me.”

It had been a long and winding road since those happy days.

After he graduated high school, he went to college and got a business degree.

Then began his decade working retail – a men’s clothing store, then store manager for Reebok, a lateral move to the Rockport shoe store.

Fed up with retail, Heath decided to reinvent himself in 2001. He moved to South Carolina and went back into construction. He owned a tile business for about six and a half years, then he went back to construction as a project manager.

And that’s when his personal life fell apart.

“I just wanted to pause and get back to working for myself,” he says.

Starting Over Together

Ashley always wanted to be a decorator.

She loved design and color. Her mom had been a screenprinter back in the day when it was still a viable career.

“But the arts were never something my mom encouraged,” Ashley says. “So when I came to her and said, ‘I want an arts degree,’ it was laughed out of the door.”

Dispirited, Ashley pursued a far more practical career in healthcare. It was a good enough living, but she couldn’t help but long for her original dream.

That’s when she met Heath, and her spark of creativity returned.

At 35, she was divorced and taking care of her son. She dipped her toe back into the dating pool, but had no interest in the bar scene and wasn’t finding any suitable single men at church.

“You go to the grocery store and nobody’s going to notice if you’re actually single, especially if you’re dragging a five-year-old kid around,” she says.

So she turned to dating websites like eHarmony and Match.com. It was a deluge of men that didn’t fit her qualifications – a gentleman who was done with games and ready to get serious.

Then one day she was browsing profiles and stopped on a photo of a cute man wearing a ball cap and holding a little dog. It didn’t look like a staged photo from an overly curated Instagram account. “He seemed real,” she says.

She reached out to him, but it wasn’t the first move. Heath had previously messaged her on a different dating site. Evidently, he didn’t catch her eye at the time.

So he wasn’t going to miss this second opportunity. He offered to take her on a date.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, let’s go,’” Ashley says.

Heath couldn’t have played it better. He drove 80 miles, picking her up at her house and then squiring her to a local restaurant called The Hair and the Hound.

He ordered the sirloin steak; she had the shepherd’s pie. “And I had a Coke to drink and she had a lemonade,” Heath says.

“It was positive,” Ashley says of the conversation. “When somebody is being positive, in the height of COVID-19, and when you probably do have a lot of stuff from your background because you’ve already been divorced. So let’s just start over.”

After dinner, Heath drove Ashley back to her house. She made a key lime pie and they watched Office Space, one of Ashley’s favorites. “I wanted to see how his humor was,” she says.

Heath passed the test.

Moving On, Moving In

Ashley had never seen so much money.

Her house  was suddenly worth a fortune. She had paid $50,000 and now 10 years later she turned around and sold it for $172,000.

First she paid back her mom, who had loaned her money for the divorce. A chunk of the rest went to a downpayment on a new home for her and her son.

On February 12, with Valentine’s Day on the horizon, Heath came over to her new home as usual. Only this time, when Ashley came down the stairs, he was holding flowers.

Heath told her how happy she made him and that he wanted to spend the rest of his lift with her if she would have him. She said yes.

At the time, Heath was six months into a yearlong lease on his bachelor apartment. BUt when he came back from another day at Ashley’s, he discovered his next door neighbor’s apartment had gone up in smoke.

The manager of the complex noticed that Heath’s water and power bills were quite low– far too low for someone who was living there full-time.

Considering the circumstances, the manager offered Heath the chance to break his lease early so that the newly homeless family could stay in the building until their apartment was repaired.

In March, Heath moved in with Ashley, and by October they were married.

“I wanted to give her family a wedding,” Heath says, “because she didn’t have one the first time.”

Blue Mist

Heath was constantly getting undercut on bids. Now that he had a family to provide for, he knew he needed to pivot from his contracting business.

Heath would use his contacts within the paint industry to start up his own retail paint store.

Ashley fulfilled her lifelong dream of being a decorator, putting to use the art school certifications she got once she started dating Heath.

To name the new paint store, the couple took inspiration from the foothills of the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains, where the precipitation hovered in an azure hue.

Blue Mist Home was born.

The retail paint business required a lot of new skills. Heath reached out to a number of paint manufacturers, but none were a perfect fit. Finally, after months of PowerPoint presentations, Dunn Edwards made their decision.

“Edwards called back and said, ‘We’re going to revisit this and I think we are going to go ahead and move forward if you want to continue,” Heath recounts. “And I’m like, ‘What?!”

Living the Dream

The hardest part has been that painting contractors are notorious reluctant to try something new.

“It isn’t easy to get painters to change their mind,” Heath says. “There’s a brand here that is very dominant.”

“Everybody in the world is telling us – all the business coaches: ‘You need to drop paint,’” says Ashley. “No, the dream is ours. We understand it.”

It hasn’t been easy, Ashley admits.

“It’s still hard, but we’re seeing traction,” she says. “We had to make a massive decision and make a big move.”

Asked if he’s ever wistful for the quietude of painting, Heath stops to consider.

“Part of me would be happy to go back to painting,” he says. “My heart and passion is more about helping people, and I think I can help people more in the retail aspect of it than in the physical painting aspect of it.”

As Ashley looks back and looks forward, she starts to tear up.

“It is extremely hard,” she says, trying to maintain her composure. “I don’t think I would have ever had the courage to do it had it not been for Heath saying, ‘Let’s do it together.’”