Either it's part of my retirement plan, or part of the reason for my early demise...
About... oh, I don't know... 14 years ago from this writing I found a little piece of property on a hill in Kerrville, Tx and the deal was so sweet I couldn't pass it up. 6.5 acres on a hilltop and before I knew it I was sucked into planning and building something straight out of the best that my imagination has to offer...
I'll leave out the details of how I found this little patch of ground, but today I it has a well and a cabin that is still in progress.
After getting the land, I began scribbling little drawings so as to give my imagination something concrete to go on. That's how my brain works. I think it, I draw it, I build it.
Here are the drawings begun in 1991 or so...
From the first, I imagined a sort of an A-frame on stilts....
That's not too bad... but it surely looked small.
From the side this...
That truck I drew underneath the house would be my 1991 mazda b2200 pickup truck which has 246,000 miles on it and I still have today. I am finally ready to sell it, though.
Notice I added a little awning over the front door in this sketch.
I noticed the front looked a little funky, so I decided to increase the deck size and think about how to attach the stairs. This was my idea for that.
If you notice the house is listing eastward in this sketch, don't be alarmed. It was a problem with the artist's state of mind when the sketch was made. At the time, this picture looked straight, but the next day after an aspirin I realized it wasn't. We corrected this at build time.
Now the work begins....
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 7
That's me. Nice hat, eh?
There is something about power tools that bring out the boy in a man.... I am no exception. This nail gun belonged to the carpenter helping me and I loved it. I think I aged in reverse for the two weeks I had access to it.
Middle of second week...
Middle of second week...
Nearing end of second week...
after 3 weeks...
This is the view of the north wall. I didn't like the way the three windows looked, so I later asked a carpenter to rip them out and put in a picture window. You can see the view from inside looking out through the picture window somewhere below.
About this time it was time to start some rudimentary plumbing. After doing this myself I decided plumbers don't make enough money.
But, I'm kind of stubborn about things and well... it was back to the drawing board:
How hard can it be????
Well, I'm here to tell you it can be plenty hard. Did I say that I don't think plumbers make enough money? God bless every one of them.
Time to go to work on the inside now....
\
Shower stall and if you look closely you can see peeking out from behind the shower stall, profiled in blue the front 3 or 4 inches of one of mankind's greatest inventions, one that made the civilised world more palatable and improved the ability of the genders to live together in harmony.
That is my buddy Stanley. I couldn't have done any ceiling sheet rock without him.
This is the view out the north window.. the one that originally had the 3 windows which reminded me of the amityville house......
This is all sheetrocked now.
And this is close to how it looks today...
There is still a lot of work to do but it is fun work and it's going to take some time to finish.