Bob & Joyce Lantz

Joyce, Bob and Friend

  Joyce and I are building a hillside house in Western North Carolina (in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains) and living in a rustic (very rustic) cabin on the same land. I built that cabin, “Old Peculier”, 12 years ago down by the river. We have enough electricity to charge up the laptop and cell phone, and operate a small refrigerator. Water comes from the well 600 feet away up at the housesite where I built a shed to house a washer and dryer. On-demand propane heats the front porch shower. But what else does one need but a cold beer, hot shower and a place to wash your clothes? The basement for the new house is finished. House raising (timberframe construction) will be in early June, 2008. Last winter, to escape the cold, we toured for 3 months and 11,500 miles in our Jeep Liberty. Visited friends and relatives (including David) in GA, FL, LA, MT, OR, CA, TX, KY and TN.

  Joyce didn’t take well to my retirement over a year ago, so she also quit work shortly thereafter. That was when we decided to sell out in TN and get serious on building the house in the mountains. I retired from being a faculty member in the Construction Technology department of a local community college. After carefully watching the carpenters and concrete handlers work on the house thus far, I think I should have been watching them long before I was teaching the stuff. Oh well, it was a 5th career, so why would I be an expert? I was working on a grant (I had written) to develop newer green-building and alternative energy techniques into residential house building. Before that I worked in a Small Business Development Center because I could advise new business start-ups (after completely crashing my own canoe building business earlier). I owned and operated The Blue Hole Canoe Company for 15 years after taking up whitewater canoeing and bringing in the typical engineer’s attitude to any marginal activity: “I can build a better craft than that!” I did, but who knew there were so many personnel issues in running a business? Earlier I had worked in aerospace on the Shuttle for NASA and for several aircraft manufacturers. 

 I played around with writing outdoor oriented magazine articles and have some out there in their various archives. (If you could find them all, you’d realize they are all actually the same story, but repackaged for the various interests of the particular magazine.) I also produced a book published by University of Tennessee Press describing all the river runs in the state of Tennessee. (Same paddling techniques but in different parts of the state.) 

 After leaving Corcoran in 1953, I attended more high school in Lompoc, CA, but eventually graduated from a Los Angeles high school. I simply didn’t know what to do then, and worked for a year as a mailboy at Lockheed. The engineers seemed to be treated well at the factory, so I went off to Georgia Tech the next year. After graduate school there, I moved to TN in 1968 and now, 40 years later, I just moved to North Carolina. Joyce has a son and two grandchildren in Montana. I have two sons and no grandchildren in TN. I have an ex-wife in TN, while Joyce leaves a couple behind in WA and probably VA. 

 We have been so focused since retirement on selling a house, building the new house, making the cabin livable, and surviving the weather, that I really am not sure what I am supposed to do after the project is complete and we make that final move up the hill. I guess I am supposed to regularly split wood (mainly to keep in shape) and not spend money except to keep the chain saw sharp. Any other advice? Bob Lantz

The light colored wood the porch. Dark wood ground floor.