J.T. Unique/J. Thompson Builders Partner, Field Supervisor and Carpenter

Brad Aschbrenner has been in the carpentry and remodeling business for 28 years, though he would say he began his career at a much younger age. When he was just 4 years old his parents purchased a 100-year-old farmhouse in their home state of Wisconsin. They spent from the year they moved in, to when Aschbrenner was in his twenties, remodeling the house. This had a large effect on what he chose to do in his professional life!

Aschbrenner has worked with our team for about 13 years now and has been an official member of the J.T. Unique family for 10 of those years.

He began his career running his own business and decided to partner with a friend. This partnership led Aschbrenner to his first Stoney Creek hotel project in St. Joseph, Missouri, where he worked with the J.T. Unique Team.

Once the St. Joseph project wrapped up, Aschbrenner traveled to Columbia, Missouri for his second Stoney Creek hotel project. Soon after, he and his partner decided to part ways and he was offered a job at J.T. Unique/J. Thompson Builders.

Aschbrenner does a little bit of everything for J.T. Unique as well as for J. Thompson Builders -- the parent company to J.T. Unique -- from basic idea generation to helping build, fabricate, finish and install pieces.

A typical workday for him includes tasks like this:

1. Sitting down with the hotel team to come up with the design ideas for a new hotel

2. Sourcing and gathering materials, such as reclaimed barn wood, to be used in the next project

3. Coming into the shop to cut, sand and distress the wood and make designs come to life

4. Putting the finishing touches on pieces before they are sent off to the job site

5. Installing pieces like hotel room vanities and specialty designs in executive suites

When traveling for a project the team will often work 10 days in a row with a four-day break in between. Aschbrenner just spent 60 days in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma working on J.T. Unique’s most recent Stoney Creek hotel project.

This project began on January 1 with initial design planning and began heavy fabrication in April. The shop has been working almost exclusively on the Broken Arrow project for the past 10 months and he is excited to see all of the plans come to life. He is particularly proud of a piece in the hotel he calls the spaceship grand staircase, which incorporated a lot of his own personal thoughts and designs.

Even though the days can be long and he is often away from home, he loves that each project starts out as nothing and when it’s done he can walk away from something knowing it is unique and it will hold such a special place in his heart.