The first thing we built
The first thing we built at The Bend was not a cabin. It was a plain, honest utility building, and I have rarely been prouder of anything.
Before you can build the beautiful thing, you need somewhere to keep the tools that build it, somewhere dry to stand when the weather turns, a base of operations on a piece of land that did not have so much as a flat, solid floor. So in the winter of 2023 we put up the first real structure on the property. The photo here is it: green steel siding, a wide equipment bay still waiting on its door, and a plain side entry, all sitting on the first flat gravel pad the land had ever held. About as glamorous as it sounds, and exactly as satisfying.
It is easy to skip past a building like this in the story. It is a shed, more or less. But it was the first time the land held something we had made instead of just something we had cleared, and standing inside it out of the wind, with a real floor under my boots, the whole thing finally felt possible. First you make a path. Then you make a place to keep your tools. Then, eventually, you make cabins.
- The property got its first weather-tight structure: a plain utility building with a real floor to work from.
Clearing the ground, and the long permitting road toward the cabins.
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