Submitted Photo Ali Parizek made a large amount of charcuterie boards to be sold for people to use for large spreads of Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. They mostly range from two to almost four feet in length.

Some athletes move on to play in a professional league after college and others follow a different path in life. Ali Parizek is one of the hockey players who decided to go into a career that was not involved with hockey.

She played hockey for 15 years, starting when she was 9 years old. She has two sisters, Jessica and Chelsea. Most of her cousins were female, as well, who were all into cheerleading. However, that wasn’t really her thing.

Two of her male cousins, Ben and Josh Slind, played hockey and she idolized them for it. She was at every one of their games when they played for Minot High School. While the Slind boys were on the ice, Parizek was playing floor hockey under the bleachers.

They taught her how to skate and she loved it ever since.

“The friendships I made on the ice were what kept me playing throughout my life,” she said.

A fun memory she shared was shooting hockey pucks in the driveway when she was younger, ruining a garage door or two. She also skated on the lake when it was frozen over in the winter while her dad ice fished, describing those as some of the best memories.

Throughout the 15 years of hockey, she was almost always a forward, saying defense was never really her strong suit. The adrenaline of skating fast and scoring goals on offense were what she loved.

“I remember my one shot at playing goalie in mites and I’m still traumatized by getting scored on in a penalty shot.”

She never played goalie again after that.

Parizek played hockey for Minot High and moved on to play for the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. She did not have a scholarship to play for UND for her freshman and sophomore years. Because she did not have a scholarship, she really had to prove herself worthy of playing for the Fighting Sioux.

“As a North Dakota kid, I knew it was where I wanted to play,” she explained, “so I tried everything I could to be recruited by them. I even played a year of ‘junior college’ after high school but before UND, just to have an additional year to prepare in hopes of making the team.”

She was in contact with the UND hockey coaches, but she had to prove herself every year and fight for her spot on the team. When she received a scholarship her junior year at UND, she said it was very minimal, so she was basically paying to play. It was worth it for her, though, because hockey was her passion and it was everything she knew she wanted at the time.

She graduated from UND in 2013 with a double major undergraduate degree in physical education in exercise science and wellness, and psychology.

After four years of playing collegiate hockey, she had to do some soul searching, just like other lifelong athletes have to do. She didn’t know what was next in the playbook for her.

Immediately after college, she took a full-time position as a personal trainer at Choice Health and Fitness in Grand Forks, but training just wasn’t the same for her anymore if she wasn’t training for a big game.

“Playing was always a competitive sport for me, so playing for fun wasn’t really in the cards anymore after years of competitive play,” Parizek said.

She worked at the fitness center until she decided to move back to Minot to help her mother care for her younger cousin. When she moved back in 2014, she took a position in the oil industry. With that came money, which gave her the opportunity to build her current home next to Lake Sakakawea, which in turn, led to her newfound passion in woodworking.

As she built her home alongside family and friends with experience in the construction industry, she acquired quite the plethora of different tools. She continued to buy what she needed to avoid having to pay a contractor to do the job.

The knowledge that was gleaned from her family and friends was in trades from framing, laying tile, cabinetry to flooring.

“When it came time to furnish the home, I found myself building items instead of buying them,” Parizek continued. “Sometimes you have an idea of what you want and you can’t find it. It was my head carpenter and uncle Rick Brekke who inspired me most to always think outside the box.”

When it came to the subject of going from playing hockey to building furniture, of course neither of them overlapped. Instead, when her days of playing hockey came to an end, she needed to find another lifelong passion again.

Unlike reading the directions to a store bought cabinet or kitchenette that anyone could buy, she used her imagination to build something unique and one of a kind.

The first thing she created was a headboard, which was a piece of plywood screwed to the wall. Something as simple as a blank piece of plywood was beautiful for her, so she ran with it.

From there, she went on to making different types of headboards to bed frames, shelving units, coffee tables, end tables, kitchen tables and bars.

Building furniture originally started with making things for herself. She branched out to making things for family members, then for family friends, too.

At first, the thought of making her hobby into a business didn’t occur to her. Working with her hands and paying for everything out of pocket was worth it because she loved it so much.

The materials Parizek used were just random pieces of wood that were laying around after she and her crew finished her house.

“I loved finding items that were going to be thrown away and recreating them into something useful,” she said. “I found a desire in creating with wood that was otherwise going to be firewood, utilizing what I had or what I could find instead of having to buy it.”

One of the reasons she chose to work with wood is it’s been the material that is readily available to her. Other than the wood laying around after her house was done, she would use wood from barns that were just going to be demolished.

She grew up on a farm and she recalled that her father always had a wood pile, following the philosophy of never throwing away a piece of wood that was more than two feet in length, as he never knew when he was going to need one for something.

“Sorting through these piles of discarded lumber and making use of it in a tasteful design for someone’s home to be treasured for a lifetime is a different kind of accomplishment,” Parizek explained.

Her friend Marantz Handshew told her, “‘Ali, you should start a business.'” He had seen her work as she shared it on social media and encouraged her.

The business thought kept getting shoved off because making furniture was a passion for her and making money off of her newfound hobby hadn’t crossed her mind yet.

She still has her job working in the oil field, which she described as “a great oil job.” The job in the oil field gives her an internal sense of accomplishment, but woodworking is very different for her. It’s something she thoroughly enjoys doing and also something she could share over social media for others to see.

It gives her “an insane feeling of pride,” much like she felt while she dominated the ice in hockey.

As she continues to build bigger and better things, of course equipment upgrades are necessary. She will soon have an entire shop dedicated to woodworking. It began in her two stall garage, but she needed more room for her larger pieces of equipment.

The shop that is currently under construction will be 1,080 square feet when it is finished. Living in North Dakota requires having a heated space, so that will be integrated, as well.

She did admit that everything she does could be done with a saw and hammer, but having a plethora of tools makes the jobs easier and faster, turning into a passion of its own. “A fine woodworker” is a term she said she would never use to describe herself.

“My taste is rustic, industrial and modern,” she said instead. “I love being able to see the way things are put together incorporating brackets and bolts into the design. The right tools are just a bonus.”

By far, her two favorite tools are her drum sander and planer. They save her considerable amounts of time. The most important part, she said, was that they both allow for a very professional finish.

Some of her best looking works are her tables that have what look like rivers running through the middle of them. The “rivers” are made from epoxy that she makes in blue and brown.

She has also made quite the collection of charcuterie boards. They started as presents for her family members, but when she posted them on social media, requests started flooding in. Some of the larger orders were for personalized boards, requested by companies and it really took off from there.

One of Parizek’s visions is to create smaller things that would fit into people’s kitchens. She knows that not everyone has the room or the means for a new kitchen table or a bar, “but everyone has room for a charcuterie board.”

With all of those large orders coming in, she could not do everything all by herself. Her girlfriend Allee Kory is her number one supporter and helper. She helps Parizek move wood piles around to get to a particular piece or to sell items at events. She’s always there to give an extra hand when it’s needed.

Her favorite five employees are their dogs, Pepper, Riggum, Brekken, Coco and Scruff. She loves that they make for the happiest work environment. She tries to incorporate them into everything as much as possible, and most of the funds that she gets from her creations goes toward buying dog food to keep the pups happy and healthy.

When Parizek finishes an order, she typically delivers the product to the customer. It allows her to spend extra time on each project and have it accessible at all times of the day and night. For some projects, however, they need to be built in place, so that can pose a challenge with several different tools at her disposal.

She has also shipped products all across the United States, from Van Hook to Oregon, and to Texas. The farthest she could recall that someone had driven to pick up an item was nine hours.

“That made me feel so incredibly valued and honored,” she said. “Large items are harder to ship and I truly love the feeling of being able to deliver the piece in person to its forever home.”

A lot of her orders are received through Rustic River Design Co.’s Facebook page, and through the website: www.rusticriverdesignco.com. Parizek mentioned she would like to have a live store available online in the near future, but for right now, everything is done by individual orders through her.

Some stores in the Minot area have asked her if she would be interested in having them hold stock for her and sell her products, but she has decided to stick to doing custom orders for the time being. She enjoys the art and personalizations that go into each one, and the custom part is one of the most exciting factors for her.

Since COVID-19 hit, prices of materials have skyrocketed, making some of them a bit more difficult or expensive to get her hands on. One of the materials she mentioned was oriented strand board, or OSB. She said the price of a single sheet of OSB went up from $13 to $30.

One order of sandpaper took over a month to be delivered to her. The amount of manpower has been decreased, as companies had to lay off workers because of the pandemic across the nation.

Despite the challenge that COVID-19 has posed for Parizek, she persists in woodworking, using what she has readily available to her to meet the demand of her growing business.

With Kory and their pups at her side, she can continue doing what she loves, just as she did when her family and friends encouraged her to play hockey through school. Hockey and woodworking may not be directly connected for Parizek, but they both have given her something to improve upon and enjoy every day.