Our Story - All About Decks

Dave grew up on a small farm in northeastern Nebraska. He was the oldest in a family of four boys. The days were filled with milking 3-5 cows by hand, bottle feeding baby calves, and raising pigs to growing corn, soybeans, and alfalfa. School was in walking distance as they attended a local country school.

Following high school, Dave worked both on the family farm as well as for a local company setting up grain bins. After a year he rented out farm ground and began raising his own livestock. During this time he wanted to pursue something outside of the farm life and enrolled in college. While there Dave played on the football team and learned how to fly airplanes. After a year in college he moved on to work for an irrigation company in central Nebraska where he installed irrigation wells and pivots. He did some farming on the side for the owner of this company. It was here that he met Devonne.

One wintery day in November, there was a snow storm that came up and prevented Dave from going home. Dave had planned to sleep overnight at the office, however, Devonne’s father (who worked next door) invited him to stay with his family that night as they only lived a short distance away. He gladly accepted and waited out the storm with Devonne and her family. Their first date shortly followed at Dave’s company’s Christmas party. Despite Dave’s car breaking down and Devonne having to pick him up, many dates followed this first one. While dating they could often be found at the roller skating rink fifty miles away in Grand Island. Dave and Devonne were married a year and a half after their first date.

After getting married, Dave began working as a service manager for a farm machinery dealership. The couple went on to have two children, Josh and Joy, and later became foster parents for a number of years caring for many foster children. After some time Dave began to look for ways to get into business on his own. He bought a swather and did custom hay swathing on the side in the summer. Unfortunately, costly repairs and a customer filing bankruptcy forced this to end after only a year.

Then Dave took a job working on a farm for several years. During this time, Rachel, the youngest of the three children was born. Dave learned about a new organization within the Center for Rural Affairs, called Lank Link. This organization took younger men with farm backgrounds and connected them with older farmers who had no one to pass their farms on to. Thinking this would be a great chance to get out on his own, Dave moved his family to a farm with a pig operation.

Devonne jumped right in by making a drafty one hundred year old farmhouse with no furnace or insulation into a home. She along with Josh and Joy helped with the pigs – pretty awesome for a city girl and kids that had spent all but two years of their lives in town! Some fun experiences that happened while on the hog farm were the amount of media attention that Land Link received. There were a number of farm magazines that wrote articles on the Ehrenberg family, and eventually, the Chicago Tribune, PBS, and even CNN came to the farm to do interviews.

After four years the family decided to leave the farm due to feed prices going up and hog prices going down. Dave moved the family to Omaha as he got a job working for a material handling company, where he later became the team lead. While in Omaha, Dave remodeled his house and began helping other people with theirs. After working in all four time zones in 2011, Dave decided he wanted to be at home more with Devonne, the children, and grandchildren.

Dave left the material handling company to pursue his own business. Dave got his general contracting license, became bonded, and began doing remodeling. On the side, he bought several houses to live in while he remodeled them. A friend suggested to him that he might like building decks, and wanting to specialise, Dave started All About Decks Omaha where they build small to medium sized pressure treated, cedar, and composite decks.