For years after I sold the Helen cabin, the idea of building one of my own never really left me. It just got quieter.
Then we had a hurricane in Florida, and I started worrying it would keep happening. In the summer of 2022, my friend Alan Norris and I spent one long day looking at thirteen properties, everything from Waynesville west to Bryson City. Sometimes we'd get to a property and couldn't even find it. Other times the photos of the view did it justice, but there was no way you could build a house on it.
That fall my sons and I came up for a weekend to take another look. It was Veterans Day, because they had the day off from school. When we got to this property, it was perfect: a ridge-top lot in Swain County with long views and the kind of quiet you can feel in your chest. A natural curve along the ridge, right off the road, would let a driveway flow in.
It checked most of my boxes. I wanted five acres, and it was three. I didn't really want an HOA, but there was one in place without a lot of restrictions. I wanted to store an RV on site and live in it while I built, and that was allowed here. The minimum was 600 square feet, and at first I figured that's what I would be building. My last house, in Helen, was 900 square feet.
I closed on the property right around Thanksgiving 2022. It was something I just did. I had the money, and I wanted it to go into something permanent instead of things that would waste away over time. No house, no driveway, no water — just raw land and a plan I could not stop thinking about. This post is where the journal starts: the day the ridge became mine.