A year has passed since my last post, and wow has life changed!
Looking back on my last post, it was the start of an 18-month journey to follow my dreams of living in the mountains and building my cabin in the woods. Today I’m reflecting on that moment and realizing that I did it! Holy crap, I did it!
I was surprised. How often do you envision a radical change in your life and make it happen? Not very often!
What happened? While I was working remotely in the country, I realized that there just was no reason I needed to spend another moment sitting in traffic and despising this suburban prison. My wife and I went looking for land while we were out enjoying the country and we found the most unlikely thing... rural mountain property with gigabit internet! This is the only requirement I had for the property, being a software engineer and avid gamer and to our surprise, there is an entire county with a co-op internet provider that provides high-speed internet. I don’t know I you’ve ever tried to escape the city only to discover that the rural internet service is a pathetic flashback to the early 90s, but it’s not pretty out there!
The basics were covered. Time to design a house, so I learned Sketch-up and built a tiny house in sketch up, got it approved by the building department here in the county, and pulled a building permit! The plan was to come here, build the house, then return to the city. Continue as usual for a couple of years, but in the first 6 months of last year, things changed again.
We gave up our rental house in the city and planned to rent again when we returned, but in the 6 months we were gone, rent prices went up 40-50%! It’s freaking nuts and I feel bad for all the people getting soaked by the rent prices but we called it quits when after 3 months of looking we couldn’t even find a place to rent because they were rented the day of listing... like I said.. freaking nuts!
Fate seemed to push us to stay where we wanted to live. Good thing we stayed because that house we started back in April last year... took us until Nov to finish! The building was late for meany reasons. Our windows were months late being delivered and getting fit into the electricians’ busy schedule was difficult. I built everything in this house with one helper except for the plumbing and electricity... I am a terrible plumber and I can’t wire a fuse box!
It was fun, exhausting, and I would do it again! I’m going to build an addition to the house later this year! I’m looking forward to building it and having it done lol.
I’m a maker and I think building a house is the feather in my cap, so to speak. I have made a lot of things over the years and I’ll make more, but nothing quite feels like the ultimate maker's achievement unlock, like building a house. Every maker that feels they are up for the challenge, I recommend taking this on. Do it! Do the outrageous.