Wednesday, September 17, 2014

New Land.......

Before I continue.. I feel the need to backtrack a little and clarify something from my last post. We actually bought the land and started clearing it while I was pregnant with our daughter. After reading it, I realize that is sounded like we did all that after we had her. It will make more sense as I continue with the dialogue. Thanks :)

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   Our new land was a mess. Having been clear-cut by overzealous loggers, we were left with tons of rotting stumps, unwanted logs and one very narrow, rutted road. My first visit to the spot where we decided we would build our house resulted in an hour of detangling briers from my hair and cockle burrs from my shoe laces and pant legs.
  Over the next several months we cleaned and stacked, burned and buried every branch and piece of debris we could. Eventually we were left with a fairly level, if rocky, piece of land big enough to build a house on. As we cleaned, I envisioned sitting on the wrap around porch of our little log house, listening to the frogs, crickets and turkeys as they called to one another. I was so excited to raise our kids in such a wonderful environment. 
    With the land cleared and my due date coming closer we turned to more practical thoughts: How were we going to get the money to build the house we wanted? Now remember, we were both working at the hospital at this time, working on the land on our days off. We discussed it and finally decided that with my husband being a jack of all trades, he would build the house himself on his days off (He worked 7 days on, 7 days off at this time), and I would continue to work until the house was finished.
We went to the drawing board and designed the house that I, I mean.. We .. wanted. and we got to work. We decided that we would use some of the bigger trees on our property to build the house out of, this meant that we would have to have a way to saw the logs into lumber... This resulted in our second major purchase: A home based band sawmill. The sawmill proved to be a very useful and profitable purchase, because as soon as people learned that we had the sawmill they started asking John to saw lumber for them as well. This was a good thing for the wallet, but a bad thing for my house..
    Our daughter was born in March, but by August we still hadn't gotten any further than the sub-floor on our house. The house became a side thought to John as he worked his week on and then sawed lumber for other people on his week off. He ended up having no time to saw for our own home.
Me being the not very patient person that I am.. gave him an ultimatum.. get my house done or I was going to buy a mobile home and move it in, because I was not going to live another winter in his mother's house. (Not very nice of me, I know.. but anyone that has ever had to live with multiple families in one home, will probably understand).
    John and I compromised, we decided to build a smaller cabin to live in, giving us more time to finish the big house. The cabin was meant to be lived in for one winter only and then used as my craft room. It took just a couple of weeks to saw the materials and a few more to construct the main frame. With the help of our sons and nephew we had our 14x20 cabin in the dry.

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