A place with a view

When Tom was a kid growing up in Cincinnati, he used to visit his grandparents in Utah and would spend time at the family cabin at Sundance. When I was a kid, I used to spend time with my friend, Jennifer, at her family cabin at Sundance. We would hike to Stewart Falls and spend all day exploring. Tom would hike to Stewart Falls and spend his days exploring, too. I wish I had a time machine so that I could see if we were ever in the same vicinity at the same time. Wouldn't that be a kick? Maybe we passed each other on the trail to the falls. I think I would have remembered seeing him, though. He was a pretty cute kid. And he probably would have liked my friend, Jennifer, and not me. But, that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, all this to say that Tom and I both loved escaping to the mountains. So it was always a dream of ours to get our own cabin someday.

When we moved to Washington we noticed that a lot of people we met had a "place" either in the mountains or by one of the many lakes around the area. Of course, their places were large and luxurious but all we wanted was a little place to hang our hats while we explored and hiked to water falls.

We found our little dream cabin at Lake Wenatchee. Well, it wasn't a dream cabin at first. At first it was a nightmare cabin. It looked like this:

Maybe that picture doesn't make it look as bad as it really was, and I promise to go into more detail about the four-year, weekend renovations but it really was a horrible little place. That's all you need to know for now.

It's on 9 acres (all woods and mountain) and was built in 1923. No one had lived in it or visited it for about 30 years except squirrels and mice. In fact, squirrel and mice nests were in every corner and all inside the walls. It was disgusting. But we had a dream. A vision. And we worked hard for many weekends until we got it looking like this:

And here's what the back looked like.

This is what the back looks like now.

It's been an amazing and extremely fun transformation and it has brought so much joy to our lives to work on it together. Actually, Tom has done 99.9% of the work but I was very supportive. We've taken hundreds and hundreds of pictures of each step of the way so there will definitely be more to follow.

And finally, this picture is taken from the corner of the property. We call it "The View". It's about a 10 minute hike from our cabin and we love to take everyone there to see why we disappear from Redmond on the weekends.