About Little Yeti Painting
Craft, Intention, and the Details That Matter
Little Yeti Painting is a restoration and specialty finish company. We do plaster, wallcoverings, restoration in older homes, and high-detail interior and exterior work — projects where the finish is part of the design, not a coat of paint at the end of a renovation.
We are not a production painter. We don't compete on price, we don't take resale-driven repaints, and we turn down work that doesn't fit. Most of our projects are tied to long-term renovations or homes people intend to stay in, where the goal is getting the result right rather than getting it done quickly.
We've built the company around that work — the materials, the methods, the training, and the kind of client who values all three. The rest of this page is about how we operate and who's behind it.
Our Mission
Raising the Standard of Craft in the Painting Trades
Little Yeti exists to raise the bar for what painting and finishing work can be — in skill, in materials, and in the experience of working with a trade professional. We hold ourselves to a standard that reflects the level of investment our clients are making in their homes.
That standard shows up in the small things: clean lines, honest prep, materials chosen for how they'll perform in five or ten years, and a crew that treats your home the way we'd want ours treated. Great craftsmanship and great service aren't separate things — they're the same commitment, shown different ways.
Warranty & Maintenance
Our full restoration projects — interior or exterior, where old coatings are stripped to bare substrate — carry a 7-year warranty. Clients on these projects can extend this warranty up to 10 years by subscribing to our annual maintenance package: a yearly visit to assess the work and address any needed touch-ups, with the annual fee determined at proposal.
The Team
Committed to Your Satisfaction
Yeti
Chief Food Officer
Yeti is the namesake and unofficial face of the company. Half dachshund, half flat-coated retriever, turning ten this summer, and — by his own assessment — the world's biggest ham sandwich. Other dogs don't interest him. People do. His standard move is to find the nearest human, sit on their feet with his back up their legs, and turn on the puppy-dog eyes until the hands arrive.
He is not involved in day-to-day operations. Schedule permitting, he may make an appearance at consultations upon request.
Drew Drake
Owner/Lead Painter
Drew started Little Yeti after a long run in hospitality — mostly bartending and front-of-house management, often at the same time, in St. Louis and New York. That work taught him what specialty finish work also demands: knowing your materials cold, executing the same thing well over and over, and reading a room (or a wall) for what it actually needs.
He runs the company's restoration and specialty work — plaster, wallcoverings, coatings, older homes that deserve to be treated like older homes. His approach is consistent across all of it: pick the right material for the environment, do the prep nobody sees, and build a finish that's still doing its job in ten years.
Jelani
Site Lead/Trainer
Jelani came to Little Yeti three years ago having never touched a paintbrush in his life. He was our first apprentice. Today, he runs jobs.
That arc tells you most of what you need to know about him — Jelani is the kind of person who picks up a new skill, gets obsessed with it, and gets good. Fast. He's meticulous on the wall, calm under pressure, and has become one of the people we trust most with the finishes that leave the least room for error.
Outside of work, Jelani is a DJ, a videographer, a music producer, a brand rep for a cannabis seltzer company, and a former competitive tumbler and cheerleader. He is also, unapologetically, a Nintendo devotee — please do not get him started on Sonic or Mario Kart unless you have time. The guy has more hobbies than most people have opinions, and somehow he's good at all of them.
If you catch him on a job site, you're getting a craftsman who came up through our own apprenticeship and brings the same curiosity to a cut line that he brings to a mixtape.
Behind the Work
A lot of what makes the work consistent happens away from the job site.
The company operates from a comprehensive manual written in-house — covering everything from how we prep a substrate to how we handle a client conversation. It's how we train, how we make decisions on the wall, and how we keep the work consistent across projects and crew members. It's also a living document; we revise it as we learn.
We're also publishing Grain & Patina, a newsletter on craftsmanship in the painting and finishing trades — what we're learning about materials, methods, restoration, and the work itself. It's written for people who care about how things are made and why.
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