Mountain Lane Homesteaders

In search of a tent we went first to our friend Frank. Frank built his own home and he's a big believer in pursuing your dreams. So when we asked if he had an outfitters tent we could borrow he looked at us in his Frank way and said "Yeah, what for?" After hearing our plan he scrunched up his face with a thoughtful look and said "Oh, you guys don't want to live in a tent. Why don't you just build yourself a shed like mine here and live in something like that? Only took me 4 days to build."

We went home and thought about it. We would need to double the size, his was only 12x12. We knew what we would use for rafters but that still involved buying lumber for walls, roofing materials, etc. We decided we needed to go back to the tent idea. When we went back to Frank he still didn't want to see us living in a tent.

*"As it happens", Frank had a pile of big logs he was thinking about using to make himself a garage.

*"As it happens", those logs were stacked in Franks wood yard right next to his SAWMILL.

*"As it happens", Frank offered to give us all those logs.

*"As it happens", Frank wanted to let us use his sawmill to make them into lumber.

At this point it became apparant that our plans were beginning to take on a life of their own.

So we let go of the tent plan and adopted the shed plan.

We still had a lot of work ahead of us to convince the bank to take a risk on our project. When it came time to make our presentation, we wanted to have as many supplies gathered as possible to show them just how serious we were. We had to prove that we could gather the materials we needed for the house which included stone and wood, and show them a design that would meet the criteria for a house built "to code", and now we were adding milling logs into boards and designing a shed to the mix.

One thing though, the next time Frank says "Only took me 4 days"......I will be asking A LOT more questions!!!