I built our home on Kentucky Lake in 2021. I had purchased the land a few years earlier but kind of left it alone while we worked on other projects. I hadn’t scoped out the property before purchasing it, because it was sort of an impulse buy. I was quite surprised to find it was right over the hill from the lake. Once the leaves came off the trees, I could see the water.
As I started to rough in the structure I began to fall in love with the area. It was peaceful and so quiet. There was nobody around. Just my neighbor Gloria and her two beautiful Golden retrievers who came by every day to visit. She lived about a half mile up the road and would drive her golf cart over so see the crazy longhaired guy building a house all by himself. These were all rich people who hire everything done. I think they were intrigued by the working class in action.
What I learned with time was that all these houses along the lake were summer homes for most of the owners. Big beautiful homes. Million-dollar properties with $150,000 boats sitting in a shed next to the house. All vacant during the winter. After I finished the house and we were living there, I would walk the dog up to the lake and along the road where all these fancy, empty homes were located. About one in ten had a resident. They did show up over Christmas and New Year and then vanished again. The year-round residents soon became our friends. They are always happy to visit when I go by. John at the end of Dogwood mows our lawn and trims weeds all summer. He makes a living mowing everyone’s lawn in the area. Harry is a retired farmer from Illinois, who lives about a mile down the road from us. He has a John Deere tractor with a loader. He loaded the logs on my trailer, landscaped our property and bladed gravel for our driveways. Bob and Linda live across the valley from us and keep an eye on our house when we are gone.
Building this house down by the lake was relaxing for me. I would work on the newspaper all morning online and then drive over from our small farm by Dover, to build all afternoon. A half-hour drive each way. The hardware store in Dover was also a lumber yard so I could pick up supplies on the way for each day. The only downside was that the pandemic panic had driven the price of lumber sky high. I was paying $9 per 2x4, during 2021. Pretty shocking to haul $1,000 of lumber to the building site each day. Fortunately, I had drawn up the plans for the house two years prior and I had purchased all the exterior log siding and interior rustic pine tongue and groove lumber while prices were good, and they were stored on the car trailer in the pole shed on the farm.
My plan had been to spend a couple winters completing this project and enjoy the summers in Minnesota. But the spring of 2022 ushered in an overheated housing market and when my wife listed our hobby farm outside of Dover, she had an offer in four days. Suddenly I was going to finish a house in four months, or we wouldn’t have a winter home to go to. I worked from 6am to 10pm seven days a week. Just like farming, only I was quite a lot older now. July and August are quite hot in Tennessee, everyday can reach 100 degrees. I got the house buttoned up before we closed on the old one and then spent the rest of the year finishing the interior.
Back to the million-dollar mansions on the lake shore. We got in the habit of driving the golf cart for miles along the waterfront roads each day with the dogs. Smaller gravel roads lead away from the paved roads and down these little paths you find a different life. Old run-down shacks where the hillbilly’s live looking right out of a century ago. Some you wouldn’t think were habitable but the lights were on. Most were surrounded by years of junk and trash. We have seen houses with so much garbage in front of the door, one can hardly get through. It is sad to find that within a mile from the most affluent lifestyle was a most depressing and primitive one. Most of these were home to people with no motivation to pick up after themselves or try and improve their lifestyle. The locals call them hillbilly’s.
