Like many Americans, Tanya Keith’s life changed when the U.S. was attacked by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001.

At the time, Keith was working as a commercial interior designer in Des Moines. Her parents and other family members lived in New Jersey.

Keith’s father was supposed to be on an airplane flight from Boston to California that morning and it was several hours before Keith learned that he was safe. Her mother taught at an elementary school in New Jersey. She stayed at the school well into the evening, waiting with her students for parents to walk from New York City to the school, Keith said.

“It was a really impactful day for me,” Keith said. “I decided that I did not want to do commercial interior design anymore. I thought that maybe you could go to hell for putting people in cubicles. … I went on a journey to find out what I was meant to be.”

Keith left her interior designer job and became an assistant race director for the Des Moines Marathon and then became an event coordinator for the Des Moines Menace and the Stadium Foundation. In July 2003, she started Simply for Giggles, an online — and later brick-and-mortar — shop that provided a variety of items for children as well as design services for children’s rooms.

Keith and husband Doug Jotzke lived in Des Moines but it didn’t feel like home, Keith said. “I was really missing the East Coast. We wanted to live in a historic home. … We had worked with a bunch of different Realtors but couldn’t find that perfect house.”

At a networking event Keith met a real estate agent who lived in Des Moines’ River Bend neighborhood, an area south of the Des Moines River roughly between Second Avenue and Ninth Street that is filled with century-plus old houses. Keith told the agent that she’d been struggling to find a house that would keep her in Iowa. The agent asked what she wanted in a house.

“I said I was looking for a four-bedroom house that didn’t cost half a million-dollars. I said I was looking for something that needed work; that it needed to be in a racially diverse, economically diverse neighborhood; and that it needed to have at least one fireplace,” Keith said. The agent said, “I know exactly the house you need to buy.”

Keith drove by the house that December night after working late at her store. The house was in River Bend, on a corner lot along Seventh Street. She used her cellphone flashlight to look at the house, which was in poor condition and in need of numerous repairs.

“I was like ‘Oh, my gosh. This is my house,’” Keith said.

A few months later, Keith closed Simply for Giggles and she and Jotzke acquired the house, a process that took nearly a year to complete and required dipping into retirement money to come up with the $90,000 cash payment.

“I fell in love with working on houses and that led us to working on other houses in River Bend and other areas,” Keith said. “I found what I was meant to be doing.”

In 2017, she launched Hat Trick Renovation.

We recently caught up with Keith.

How did you come up with the name Hat Trick Renovation?

I’m a huge soccer fan, and a hat trick is the scoring of three goals in a game by one soccer player. It’s a term used in hockey and darts, too. We lovingly call our three kids the ‘hat trick.’ It’s a term that has meaning to us.

Talk about the first house Hat Trick Renovation renovated.

It was a house in the Drake neighborhood that was built in 1901 that had been cut up into eight apartments. It had had a fire and there was burn damage. We gutted it and filled 17 40-yard dumpsters with crap taken out of [the house]. It was a learning experience. That was the house that taught me that tearing out historic plaster is a terrible idea. …

When you tear out all of that historic plaster, first of all, it weighs a ton and you are paying [by weight] to dispose of it. Also, it is a better-quality product than drywall. It’s a better insulator. And we joke that it’s “structural” plaster. In older houses, you’ll often see windows framed with two-by-four [pieces of lumber]. When you take the plaster down, then you have to go back and bring that framing up to code. If you leave the plaster, you don’t have to do all of that work and you’re saving money.  

Hat Trick Renovation got off to a slow start. Explain why.

We started Hat Trick in 2017. I got business cards printed and stopped to pick them up. I got them and drove about three blocks toward picking up my child from preschool and I was rear-ended. I was at a full stop and the guys behind me didn’t stop. They hit me at about 30 mph. I developed a brain injury that changed my life. I would lose my balance just walking. I couldn’t tolerate light or sound. I really became a completely nonfunctional human.

There are things your brain does that we don’t appreciate. You can walk around a grocery store with a million different colors and lights and sounds and you don’t notice it until you notice it. … It would take me three days to recover from being in a grocery store for 10 minutes.

Luckily, I found On With Life [a nonprofit group that provides rehabilitative services to people with brain injuries and neuro-related illnesses]. … They saved my life. It took me over a year to fully rehab from that accident.

Did you finish the first house?

We are very close to finishing. I was able to work myself back to working full time and then the pandemic hit. I became a kindergarten teacher for my child. Everything was put on pause again. We have three houses that will be finished this year.

You recently were involved in an unsuccessful effort to save the Highland Apartment building from being demolished. What did that experience teach you?

It taught me that Des Moines is missing the small, agile commercial developer that is doing historic preservation. Des Moines needs that developer who can do small to midsize projects and who understands the historic marketplace.

The problem with the Highland Apartments was that they were having this historic building bid by contractors that only knew “gut and redo.” That meant their [estimates] were coming in high. You don’t have to gut and redo a historic building. You can delicately demo what you need to do to get new building systems in – new plumbing, HVAC, electrical. And then you just repair what you had to demo.

I realized I need to expand into the commercial space but also do some sort of training. … If Des Moines is going to reach [its] stated sustainability goals and their stated development goals, they can’t keep tearing down buildings like Highland Apartments.

Late last year, you started Preservation Corps United. Explain what it is.

It is my educational wing. If you own a historic structure and want me to do the work, call Hat Trick Renovation. If you own a historic structure and you want to do the work yourself or train your employees, that’s Preservation Corps. We are having classes in historic plaster, historic windows, historic storms and passive floors, which is our most popular class. Instead of sanding a historic floor, which takes off part of the floor and shortens its life span, you lift the finish with chemicals, and then you put down a new finish.

In October, Bob Yapp from the Belvedere School [for Hands-On Preservation] is coming here to teach historic window restoration. That will be an amazing opportunity for people to come and train with a nationally known instructor.

Where do you see Hat Trick Renovation and Preservation Corps United in five years?

I want Hat Trick Renovation to be the source for historic renovation in Des Moines, Iowa. I want Preservation Corps to be a nationally known preservation trade school that is based in Des Moines. There are many places across the country that are now seeing that historic preservation is one of the best ways to reduce your carbon footprint as a municipality. The work that we do is in demand. Someone in western Illinois wants to hire me. A person from Maine wants me to teach a class there. … I would love to be able to just spend my time coaching people across the United States about taking care of their historic houses. My hope is that in five years, Des Moines has a vibrant, historic preservation plan that reflects their stated sustainability goals and that we will help Des Moines become a thriving center of historic preservation teaching in the U.S. 

What do you do in your free time?

I’m obsessed with soccer. I’m a full-on, rabid supporter of the Des Moines Menace. I’m very excited about USL Pro Iowa Championship Soccer coming to Des Moines. I follow the Portland Timbers [soccer team]. I’ve written two books about soccer. Doing that was part of my [traumatic brain injury] rehab. I wrote a young adult book about soccer and I’ve written a travel memoir about following the U.S. soccer team around the world. I’ve watched U.S. soccer in 14 different countries.