We lost a bidding war on a log home the size of a storage shed. Priced out, the second part of our plan seemed doomed. Then the pandemic turned Asheville into a place where realtors could pay their kid’s Ivy League tuition off a single commission. In 2019, we traded our home near the New River in Fort Lauderdale for a Miami condo and banked a little cash for that place in the woods. That’s what we’ll do too, my wife and I decided on the drive to White Duck Taco Shop. He explained that he had sold his house and bought a condo, and then purchased a second place in the mountains. The idea for this project came years earlier when my wife and I walked off the Art Loeb Trail in the Western North Carolina woods and met a guy from Gainesville, Florida. Should you try your hand at fixing an old cabin too? Or should this be a cautionary tale? Let’s assume, before I explain more, you don’t have high blood pressure. A writer with no formal construction experience, I did most of the work myself, leaning hard on internet videos and advice from friends and city inspectors. Sometimes it felt like the whole house might tumble down the incline, and some days I would’ve been thrilled to find it in a heap down on Charlotte Street.īut renovating the old place also brought a series of small triumphs. The snake became one of many unpredictable, sometimes downright disastrous moments that struck while redoing my timber cabin perched on the side of a cliff in Asheville, North Carolina. As I raised the shovel higher, I heard a crack from the boxes below. I’d have one strike, one quick shot with the metal edge. Killing the thing would bring me no pleasure, but fighting it into a pillowcase sounded like foolishness. Thing is, he warned me, a racer’s non-venomous bite hurts like hell. Black racers eat rodents, so catch and release it if you’re brave. His next opening was six weeks out, but he walked me through options.
The workers found the snake that morning. Moments like this, when I’ve got one shot at an athletically difficult maneuver, aren’t exactly a strength for me, a man just shy of his fiftieth birthday who picked daisies in left field in Little League. Construction workers peered in through the window. As I raised the shovel, my palms sweated against the wooden handle.
There I stood, in my “dream cabin,” freezing on a late winter morning, balancing on a stack of boxes as bulky as a loveseat.