>>2594411since before I can remember. I grew up in a rural town and when my parents married (before I was born) they rented a room in an old farmhouse which was known, since about 1720, as the Mount Pleasant Estate. After a few years they had enough money to buy 14 acres of land in a nearby tract of forest, which itself is about 2000 acres. The first year they lived in a shack while an acre of their was being cleared and the grounds were being graded and readied for construction.
My parents bought a log cabin from a catalogue, and after a few design changes the house started to arrive on the property by the truckload. The foundation was excavated and the concrete poured, and then came the task of actually constructing this log house per the instructions, all the while trying to stay ahead of the truckloads of logs and building supplies that were being delivered month after month.
My dad rented a small crane and two builders, and over about 11 months the 3 of them built our fucking house, log over log. I was born about halfway through this process and there are photos of me in a cradle in the middle of the construction. After 11 months the house was livable, even though the first winter was drafty and cold as hell apparently. It took about another 10 years to finish the inside of the house (floors, interior walls, etc) but I clearly remember being 3 or 4 years old, sitting on a temporary plywood floor keeping warm in front of this big beautiful brick fireplace while a blizzard raged outside and snow would blow in through the cracks in the logs.
My whole childhood me and my brother ran feral in those woods, and my dad would always tell us we had no idea how lucky we were, and he was right. I lost all of my fear of the New England forest, even at night, by the time I was 5 or 6.
Anyway, this is probably a blogpost at this point but I was just getting nostalgic. Pic is the house my dad built the way it looks today.
