VT house back story

I always wanted to create my own house. it is ,for me, the perfect combination of art, engineering, daydreaming, hard work and satisfaction. But it was also an act of necessity. my family of four humans and three dogs needed a home. We reluctantly left SW Colorado to move back to Vermont. the cost of living in the San Juans was out of reach. We lived in Ouray, across the street from the courthouse in a great rental house my friend Mark owned and rebuilt. in 2019, when we left to relocate in VT, the average home price in Ouray was $780k. Telluride was three times more for a miners cabin. I remodeled and built in Ouray, Telluride, Ophir, Trout Lake, Rico, no place could we afford a house. We tried Montrose. no thanks.

In July of 2019 we visited Vermont to look at both land and houses with land. In hindsight we should have just bought land that summer. we decided looking via long distance with quick visits wasn’t working. So we moved to a rental house in Cabot vermont in December ,2019. Covid hit 3 months later and upended any plans to buy or build. the flight to rural vermont took any house or property under $200000 off the market in days. many were just waiting to fall down, bought sight unseen. buyers remorse was at an all time high.

We eventually bought land in Peacham Vermont. A town with no state highways running through it. just miles of dirt roads, hills and ghosts of old farms and a way of life just recently gone. My family doesn’t seem to sense it, but I do. to them we “ live in the woods”.

I grew up in Connecticut but have a long history in Vermont. my parents bought land up here in 1964? i spent my summers camping in the woods up here, just a filthy, unwashed, feral rodent of a child. My parents had divorced, my dad kept the land and i came up here with him. it was then ,and still today bittersweet. my father was a kind, but raging drunk. he drank a half gallon of vodka a day. there were mounds of old bottles of his left in the woods. I have one in the shop i dug up a few years ago. He made it out in 1979, at 38, I was 10. my fondest memories of him are up here.

With my father gone I longed to be back up here. People were different. we had friends and neighbors who didn’t have running water or electricity in their homes. They had a dairy cow. Chickens ran all over. Time felt like it stood still. They all worked hard on their farms. people were part of the landscape, not trying to impose themself on the land. it felt different. I wanted different.

I kept coming back. once i could drive I came up all the time to camp on my father’s land. everyone in that part of Cabot knew who I was even if I didn’t know them. I walked the 270 miles of the long trail a few times. mostly alone, some times with friends. I moved to montpelier after moving back from 8 years in Bozeman/west yellowstone. My wife and I lived in Plainfield, VT, our twins were born in Randolph. we ice climbed and skied all over. the Adirondacks were close. We left to move to New Zealand for a job, but really went for the adventure. we ended up back in Bozeman after a couple of years on the south island New zealand. we wanted to try living in the west again. I took a job in Fort Collins, CO and after 9 years in Colorado made it back to Vermont.

my Alpine Luddites shop in Ouray