The Roost

How The Craziness Started

In 2004, when I was just getting used to being a twenty-something, I bought an adorable little house with a slate roof and arched doorway, and settled into turning it into the cozy little dream house that I knew it could be, all by myself. Some of that work can be seen under the Garrison House pictures on the Before & After page.

Suffice it to say, I was bit by “the bug” and I haven’t stopped buying power tools tearing down walls since.

Some time later, when there was very little left to do on Garrison Road, I met my own personal lumberjack engineer, who had just about convinced me I was built for Country life when a little house and the three acres it sits on came up for sale just next to his Grandpas farm.

As far as we can tell a year and a half later, the house and property only has three things going for it:

1.) It was cheap.
2.) It came with a building that could be used explicitly to store my ever-expanding tool collection.
3.) It has enough room for a couple of Miniature Donkeys.

We call it the Memorial House.

The Adventure

It took us 18 months of shuffling our feet and thinking about this-and-that, and finally hiring the architect who saved our sanity, but we finally have a master plan to turn this into our dream house.

It entails essentially doubling the size of the house with our bare hands. A project we intend to start in 2010, and finish sometime around 2103. Yeah. You read that right.

In the meantime we’re fixing up the old gas station the property (affectionately referred to as the Station) to live in while we replace every wall in the house.

So we’re a little insane…what of it?

Our dream is to live as off-the-grid as possible, tending our garden, rolling our eyes at our two black cats, and loving the heck out of our future miniature donkeys. And of course, buying new power tools at every available opportunity.