This one's for the people who already know me — friends, family, and anyone who wandered in curious. No pitch, no service list, no "let's build yours." Just the longer story.
You've met me in faded jeans, in a suit, and with my sleeves rolled up. This is the one underneath all of those — the same dot that fires arrows everywhere else, just sitting still for a minute.
If the rest of the site is what I can do for you, this is simply who I am when nobody's paying me to be useful. Land, family, the long game, and a few things I've loved for no good reason at all.
Forty acres in Lee County, held since 1886. My mom spent her childhood summers here and has always wanted to come back — and I'd like to make that possible, for both of us.
The dream is small and off-grid-minded: a little camp and skills retreat for writers, artists, and climbers, just up the road from the Red River Gorge and Natural Bridge — some of the finest climbing in the country. There's a clifftop, a waterfall, and a spring-fed creek that drops to a trickle in a dry stretch but never runs dry; limestone underfoot surely hiding a cave I haven't found yet; and an old tobacco barn stuffed with salvaged pipe and peeled timber, all waiting on a second life.
Some of these women owned the land outright — and a bank could still refuse them a loan unless a man co-signed for it. That didn't become illegal until 1974.
watch from above
Rough order of operations: get water in, build a shower, clear the mess, set up solar, repair the barn and the little buildings, fix up Mom's twenty-year-old travel trailer — and then start inviting people out for alternative-building workshops of all flavors.
What I really want is a life full of useful experiments: minimalist furniture with a little Dwell-magazine nerve, bat houses, bee hives, jewelry displays, weird little fixtures — maybe anything that gives me an excuse to buy a lathe. If I can't run off to an off-grid commune, maybe I'll build my own smaller, stranger version — part workshop, part camp, part "come learn something and leave with sawdust on you."
Note to self: build a coop for the ducks out in the middle of the pond, where the predators can't reach. Duck eggs would make jaw-dropping deviled eggs.
The business pages have the receipts — the work that pays. These are the ones that don't quite belong on a résumé but explain me better than any of it.
She was flipping old Denver houses in the '70s — before it was cool, or even called "flipping." I was right there beside her, too young for it by today's standards. Child services might've frowned, but it "grew hair on my chest," as grandpa would say. Everything I know about making a tired place worth loving again, I learned on those floors.
I deep-cleaned my mom's old Singer, had so much fun I went and bought three more — a treadle included. Turns out there's no market for them, sadly, so this one was purely for the joy of it. Keeping one; the treadle and an old Japanese clone are still looking for good homes.
Pizza shops, a backflow business for nearly two decades, a recycling outfit, a shuttered plant to empty out, garden beds from reclaimed pallets, a stubborn Chinese robot with no manual, a Linux machine I taught myself to build and live on. None of it was a plan. All of it was curiosity plus a refusal to leave a puzzle alone — which is the only real résumé I've got.
That's the longer story. Thanks for reading it.