430 Days of Living The Good Life

When I was 19, I bought an acre of land and found this house trailer. It was in such bad shape that the owner said that if I move it, I could have it. $440 later, I was the king of my castle and I turned the gutted living room into a woodshop. This was my very first woodshop. A few years later, I married the love of my life and I found myself doing maintenance work at an apartment complex. I cleaned out this junk three-bedroom unit, put some of my woodworking tools in it, acquired some more woodworking tools, and called it my second woodshop. It was here where I started this thing called a YouTube channel in 2012. In 2014, we purchased our first home and I turned this 20x20 foot two-car garage into my third woodshop. I learned a lot and built a lot in this space. And shortly before leaving, our daughter was born and life slowed down quite a bit. Right after paying off our first house early and doing our debt-free scream, we sold and found a nice home in a nice community with a nice 30x40 foot pole barn out back. I turned the automotive man cave shop into the woodworking shop of my dreams. We snowballed the new house, debt, and once again yelled out a debt-free scream. Life was great, life was easy, and sometimes when you eliminate challenges, life can get a little bit boring. We're in a town that we had no connections to and we're about an hour and a half away from our closest family. The housing market was high and we wanted to get closer to family, so we sold almost everything in the house and a few space-consuming machines, packed all of our remaining belongings into a 40 foot shipping container, and moved six minutes away from my wife's family compound. And then life truly, truly began. We bought a 100 acre chunk of forest with a single four-wheeler trail and a creek running through it. There was no driveway. We cleared the wall of trees to find a gate, cut perimeter trails to better look after the entire property, hired out the driveway excavation and bulldozer work, marked off two acres to clear for a shop and a home site, had those trees taken down with an excavator, cut up several trees into logs before burning up my chainsaw, stacked the remaining trees into a 300 foot long burn pile, had one heck of a controlled burn, and that was hot. We realized most of the trees didn't burn, so we fished those out and gave them to some friends. We cleaned up the clearing in preparation for a shop build, had underground electrical ran by our utility company and a dirt pad for the shop installed, forestry mulched an area behind the shop for a future orchard, we trenched 1,300 feet and installed water pipe, finally the muddy driveway was covered in concrete washout and then 57 limestone, so that concrete trucks could make their way to the workshop site. Before the shop structure was built, I started taking down beetle damaged trees that could potentially hit the shop. The shop materials were delivered and on day 214 of this venture, the shop assembly began. Day 228 was the final shop build day as well as the septic installation day. On December 1st, 2024, 237 days after purchasing the property, we moved our camper into the shop and started really living the good life. The front of the shop got some much needed dirt attention. We welcomed two Belgian Malinois puppies to our family. The connex was emptied as the tools finally made their way to the shop and I knocked my jointer over in a really dumb dumb moment. I covered the dirt with more concrete washout and oh yeah, it snowed. It snowed a lot. We got six inches of snow and we built a snowman. More concrete washout under the lean-to. I hired a powerlifter named Clark so that we could utilize pallet racking in the shop. I completed phase one of four of installing my favorite shop lighting from American Green Lights and then completed phase two of four of installing my favorite shop lights from American Green Lights under the 20 by 60 foot lean-to. The machines were put into place and I unpacked and I unpacked and I unpacked and I unpacked and I unpacked some more. Powered the tools with a sub panel and here we are. Day 430 of living the good life. It is June 12, 2025 and my forever shop on our forever generational property is finally set up and operational. It's a 40 foot by 60 foot welded I-beam structure with 14 foot walls and a 20 foot by 60 foot lean-to. With the goal of not taking on any debt, we could only afford to buy the land and build either a shop or a house. We chose to build the shop first and live comfortably in our camper until we can afford to build the house.