The short answer is… I’m living in Cornbread Mafia country. However, I spent my first three years in Kentucky, about 45 minutes north of Lexington (horse farm country and positively stunning). When I got here, my daughter was restoring an old house and put me to work. Eventually, my daughter and her husband (aka my SIL) found land near his family – and as soon as they got a road in, we started building on that site.
However, my SIL works 60-80 hours a week, so my daughter is doing the work herself (including construction, plumbing, electricity, finished carpentry, etc.) – with Mama’s help of course and husband on weekends and sometimes father-in-law too.
Anyways, last fall, they finished the restoration and put the house on the market and it sold right away – oops. They had to be out in a month and the new house was not finished, but they moved in anyways. Suddenly, we were building two new houses and I was a four and a half hour round trip away. We solved that problem by putting up the shell for my house, then bought a trailer. For the next 6-12 months I’ll be living in my spaceship (aka trailer) right next door to my house. But I’m a mountain woman and living in the flatlands got me down, so I’m thrilled to be living on a gorgeous mountain covered in timber, with good grazing land below, and good farmland at the bottom. I wake each morning to a herd of angus cattle and their calves grazing on my terrace as they make their way from one meadow to the next. A parade of deer, foxes, wild turkeys, herons, ducks, geese, bunnies, turtles, frogs and groundhogs (which I find adorable) come to drink from our year-round springs, ponds and streams.
JD, people don’t realize how much trade skills are really worth anymore. Worse yet, people don’t realize how much money corporations/developers are making off the backs of skilled tradesmen/women (its effing obscene). The only reason we can afford all this is because we got skills galore. Since we provide the labour, both homes are material costs only. Between us, we’ve saved several hundred thousand dollars in labour costs.
