How This Dream Turned into Reality

 

Our Log Home Story Nov. 13, 2020

 

When I met my husband David (in 1979) we were on a date and he told me how much he loved brick homes and log homes. He really wants to build a long home best. I said, “you want to build it yourself”? He said “yes”. He then went on to tell me that he would like to take a class on the log home building. After we got married, he kept talking about his dream to build a log home himself. We had our first son Ben, then came along Jason. We talked about the log home and how we could do this ourselves. David had heard about a man in Duval Washington was giving classes on (you guessed it) a long home building. It was a weed-end class and we both attended it. The cost was $300.00 for us both. When we got to the place in Duval, we were very surprised indeed! The log home where the class was being held was very big, but the door was so small!! It was only about 5 feet tall. Really, it was! So, David opened the door and we bent over to go it. The inside was beautiful. After the two days were done David started to think about the home he wanted to build. At first, it was to be two-story and 32’ x 32’, but as the days went by David was thinking, “how are we going to pay for this size house”? He went back to his drawings and came up with 28’ x 28’. I not knowing much of anything about building or realizing how small that was in a house said “OK”.

David’s father had 10 acres and gave us 5 acres and his brother Donald 5 acres. We were living on the 5 acres with my two girls from my first marriage and our two sons Benjamin and Jason in a little trailer about 45’ long and only 8’ wide. There was no running water or electricity. We were on that property for no more than two months and we just didn’t think it was where we should be living. It just didn’t feel right. We then bought 5 acres between Eatonville and Graham Washington. This was November 1985. Yes, it was not a great time to put yourself on an undeveloped 5 acres with mud up to your knees! We did it anyway with our old little blue trailer. To help you see this in your mind if you ever watched “I Love Lucy” there was an episode that she and Ricky were traveling through the US in a blue travel trailer. Well, ours was exactly like theirs. The only difference was that ours was over 33 years old and at the first rain we had we found out it had leaks in the roof. We had no money to buy anything else so we bought an old army tent. That thing was so darn big it covered the entire trailer. Yes, all 45’ of it and some to spear! We set it up right over that old trailer and that solved the problem of the water leak. We thought we would only be living in it for about 1 year. Oh, boy were we wrong about that! We lived in that old thing for just over 3 years. All that time we had no running water or electricity. We would go to our neighbor, they lived just over a mile away and got water from them. We could only bathe in it because their water was NASTY tasting, you couldn’t drink it. We would go to a place where the water came down the side of a hill and get all the freshwater we wanted. This so much good water, we could cook and drink it. We borrowed a generator from a friend and wouldn’t ya know it… it broke on us after having it only a few months. We had to pay for it to get fixed and used it for the rest of the time we were living in that old trailer. Oh yes, I forgot to tell you, I also got pregnant with our third child. A beautiful girl, Jessica. This is a lot of people in that old little trailer for such a long time.

Well, this story can really run on and on but I’m sure you might not want to read all of it so I’ll just to the next part.

David’s dad bought us a larger trailer after just over 3 years. It was white, about 50’long x 12’ wide. It was nice to have more room. But, once again there was running water or electricity in this one too for about a week. One of our friends came over that helped us hook up some electricity to it. You see we were able to get a temporary power pole in so we were then able to hook up the electricity to it. Man, it was great having lights again. Then we hooked up the hose from the well house we had just put in. Ran it to the kitchen sink. It was cold water but we had water and I was so grateful to have it, in fact, all of us were. We still had to put a pan of water on the stove (it was a gas, propane) to heat the water and then take it to the bathroom and pour it into the tub then add some cold water so we could take our baths. We had 2 more children too. Another boy and another girl. No this makes 8 people in this white trailer.

I think most of you are thinking this: is this for real?? Is it all made up?? Sounds crazy!! Well, it is all very true. It was not my kind of fun let me tell you. But we managed the best we could. We lived in that white trailer for another 3 years. We were working on our Log Home for about 4 ½ of those years. We built it out of pocket. This means we didn’t get a loan, we paid cash for everything we could, used a few credit cards too but not much. Building our log home is a story in its self. But that is why I have a blog on Home Renovations though. I helped with a lot of the finishing of our home. I did about all the mudding and taping. You see, we have log walls all on the first story but only 2 logs high on the second story. We had a difficult time with the winches that we used to get the logs on top of each other. We broke 2 of them and couldn’t afford to buy and brake more so David used block and tackle pulley system to get the other 2 layers of logs for the second story. We had to stop and do a regular stick frame for the rest of the second story. That is why I had to do the mudding and tapping on the sheetrock on the second story. There is so much more to this story but I will save it for another time, another entry.