Misty Petersen has a simple, yet rewarding hobby.

“I build stuff,” she says.

OK. That’s cool. What kind of stuff?

“Furniture,” she says. “Home decorations. Things like that.”

Petersen points to a wooden TV stand on the other side of the room in her two-story Quincy home. “I made that TV stand. I built the white bench in the entryway. I built the shelves near the front door. It’s something that my friend, Joey Hodges, and I have been doing for a few years now.”

When Petersen isn’t at work as a reading teacher at Mountain View Elementary School or keeping up with the various activities of her children, there’s a good chance she can be found in her garage, working on her next project.

“It’s fun,” she said. “When somebody tears down an old fence or something like that, they’ll call us and ask if we want the wood. We grab as much wood as we can — old doors, windows, fences. We like old stuff.”

So how many projects have they completed?

“I wouldn’t say tons and tons, but we’ve done a lot,” Petersen says. “We’ll just sit out in the garage and crank them out.”

Her daughter Madison, sitting next to her mother on the couch, rolls her eyes in a display of comical objection. “No, you’ve done tons and tons,” Madison says.

“Right now we’re just building for ourselves,” Petersen said. “People have talked to us about building and selling, but right now we still have a lot of ideas that we want to do for us first.”

Woodworking may be one of Petersen’s passions, but being a wife and mother is the focal point of her everyday life. Misty and her husband, Wade, have five kids — Chase is a junior and Madison a sophomore at Quincy High School. There’s also Trey, an eighth-grader, Gunnar, a sixth-grader, and Gates, a fourth-grader. They keep the house buzzing with school activities, church projects and their various athletic endeavors.

Yes, it’s no surprise that sports are a big part of Petersen’s household. Wade is the head basketball coach at Quincy High School and an assistant football coach.

When Misty met Wade, she wasn’t as enthralled with athletics as her future husband was and is. “Growing up, my dad watched basketball on TV, so I knew what it was, but I never went to the high school games or anything like that,” she said.

But now, Misty sits with her children in rapt attention right behind the Quincy bench at every home basketball game, cheering her husband’s team to victory. She enjoys every second of it — usually.

“It’s a killer,” she said. “It’s stressful with all the close games. But I’ve really gotten into it. The thing with Wade is, he’s intense during the games, but he never brings any of it home. He’s never upset or stressed. His motto is, ‘You can’t do anything about it.’ I say, ‘It must be nice being you.’ ”