Well, another red-letter day, but this time it doesn’t involve a guitar.
After almost two months of on-and-off-again work, today I laid in the final plank of 420 sq.ft. of ¾” solid oak flooring up at the homestead. Backbreaking labor, but worth every sore muscle. What’s cool is the flooring was recycled for a song from the old Brown County bowling alley, so we have a bit of local history underfoot. We like that.
Gotta thank my wife, Rhonda, for lending an invaluable hand as her busy schedule allowed, and also my granddaughter Cecilia, who helped me one day last week, and at 6 years of age proved to be a mighty fine worker for her pappy. She proudly deposited a whole dollar of her earnings in her piggy bank afterwards. The girl is developing a good work ethic, you betcha.
The place is still a mess, but I do have a pic of the final course done and done, with only a little staining and finishing to do before I can start moving the furniture into place. I’ll probably never be finished working on the homestead, but days like this are sweet indeed.
Might mention that the cedar wall you see in the pic was also recycled. I copped it all from the old Eucalyptus Tree building down on the corner of Main and Jefferson in Nashville. I went in over several days and and ripped out the lovely rough-sawn 6″ cedar planks, hauled it all up the hill, and went to work.
Why do all this? Well, we bought our homestead with a 20’x24′ “dried-in” unfinished room the former owner started but couldn’t finish… nothing but a roof, windows, a door and Tyvek on the exterior walls. No insulation, no wiring, no heat. The first year the big room was just a warehouse for the stuff that wouldn’t fit in the old part of the house. The second year we insulated and put in the wood stove. Third year came the wiring and the poplar siding, which I milled from native Indiana trees. Rhonda and I have inched the room along as time and finances allowed, and we’ve made it happen with a lot of patience, sweat equity, looking for good deals, and perseverance.
It wasn’t so much that we had to do things this way. We could have afforded a ready-made house. But I wanted to cop a great deal on a secluded Brown County fixer-upper with a lot of potential, do the work ourselves, and take pride in making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Kinda old-school, you might say. I was lucky in that wifey had the vision to see what I saw in this place, otherwise it wouldn’t have panned out. I could not have done it without her.
Now the hardest work is done, and it’s down to the finishing touches. I’ll be hammering away at this project for years to come, no doubt, but the result is I’ve never felt so completely at home, living with my gal in a home we’re transforming through determination and hard work, located in the greatest county in America, I swear. I’m just an old guitar player, and wouldn’t attempt to build a house from scratch, but what we’re doing up here on Taterbug Hill suits me right down to the ground.
Plans continue to unfold. We’re gonna continue the deck we started when we moved in on around the house, and hope to be hot-tubbing on it, overlooking the lake, before summer’s end. I truly feel sorry for folks who never swing a hammer, never pull a muscle, who spend way too much on a house that can never be a home, only an investment to be traded off like some old used car. If I have my way, our grandkids (who love this old place) will inherit it one day, and fondly remember their old eccentric pappy who taught them the pleasures of working hard to create something special to call their own. My folks taught me that, a life making music for a living refined it, and today… well, it’s just how I am.
