WE GET A LITTLE LUXURY.

    Unless you just want to test a marriage, I don't recommend building a house while you live in it but it does give you more appreciation of what goes into it.  Nancy and I look back on it now and don't believe that it could be us that did all this.

    Our furniture was all stored in the basement after the house was dried in.  It was up on old shipping pallets to keep it off of the floor.  After the builder turned the house over to us we still had all the sheet rock, trim carpentry, Doors, fixtures, painting and finishing all woodwork to do inside and all landscape, large garden, clear land, orchard, etc. work to do outside.  We had saved up some vacation time for me to do more of the work but we contracted the rough electrical, heating, and plumbing out.

    We brought up our mattresses and put them on the floor with a few folding chairs and we moved into the house.  We had a temporary power pole up on the hill and I ran a temporary drop to the house with one bare light bulb that we hung from the upstairs ceiling in the 2 story high dining/ family room.  We did have a couple of drop cords to plug in power tools, radios, and such.  I had a pager supplied by IBM that had to be charged each night that I could now do inside.  I had been putting it in a plastic bag and plugging it into the temp power pole on top of the hill.  We even survived many months without any TV.

    The sheet rock was all leaned up against the wall and the trim lumber and door package was covering the center of the floor from the dining room to the family room wall with barely enough room to get around it.  This would get smaller as time went on but we still had some there until after Christmas.  We heated the house with the wood burning fireplace until after Christmas   Along with getting permanent power came lights in every room with real switches, a large attic fan, and even an infrared heater in the master bath.  Folks could get spoiled with all that luxury.

    After the well was in but the septic tank was not, we could have a real bath or shower with a temporary drain outside for a few days.  No toilets yet.  We didn't have inside doors up yet but by leaning up some sheet rock just right we could have some privacy.  Nancy took her candle and disappeared into the downstairs bath for a long time and left word that she was not to be disturbed.  Bless her heart, she deserved it.

    To get dressed you needed to stand on the mattress so your pants wouldn't get sheet rock dust on them.  We put the Christmas gifts in plastic bags under the small Christmas tree that we cut off of our land to keep the sheet rock dust off of them.  I was amazed that if you sand that stuff anywhere the dust immediately travels to every place in the house.  We eventually had a nice house but we didn't get the carpet installed until spring just before Debbie's wedding.  More on that later.

     Months after we had moved out of the camper I told Nancy that I needed a trailer to pull behind the tractor and she said, "No problem, just burn the canvas off of the camper".  No, she was not smiling.

Hint:  A trick that my Grandfather showed me is that there is no such thing as a bare spot in a real Christmas tree if you can cut off of more than one tree.  Take a drill and drill a hole where nature didn't put a limb and cut one to fit in the hole.  We did that for years.


Fredric Bastiat:
 “Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder 

into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the 

expense of everyone else.”