Durango

On my last day of work, my Xbox team took me to an afternoon Seattle Mariners game. First row, First side on a blue sky day. Quite the honor since I was just a contractor. I think the Mariners may have even won. It was a lot of fun and a good ending to probably one of the more fun places that I have worked.

We headed over to the Pyramid Ale House after the game to wait out the traffic and ok, maybe drink a few more beers. A conversation started up with Nick and Katie, a friendly young couple in town from Durango, Colorado. I really liked Durango the last time I was there and had it on my list of towns to hit on this tour. I still had another month or so of house and trailer work before I could even leave and no route mapped out as to when I was going to be there once I did. We still exchanged email addresses and I promised to look them up when I rolled through.

True to my word and probably a bit surprising to them, I checked in about a week before it looked like I would be there.

I hit Durango a day early but Nick and Katy offered to let me stay in their driveway. One of my faults is that I am punctual, Not early, never late. Since I was early, I decided to get a campsite that night and come over the next night. I roamed around Durango for a bit and it was definitely one of my favorite towns on the trip. Right size, Busy but small downtown, mountains, nice people.

I spent the better part of the next day, doing general life maintenance; internet catch up, organized and repacked the car and some other chores so I didn’t get to take advantage of the area. Still, I got a good feel from it.

I rolled over to Nick and Katie’s in late afternoon. Had a few beers and got a tour of the pending homestead. Nick bought the property with plans of building a timber frame house on it. We sat on the deck of the trailer that came with the property, drank some beers, chatted and looked at the house plans.

Nick had taken a couple of seminars in timberframing and was now practicing what he learned before starting on the house. To that end, he had spent the summer cutting and notching the timbers for a work shed to hone his skills and they were now ready to be put together. His day job is that of a skilled carpenter so there was little worry that the shed wouldn’t go together perfectly. The challenge is the lack of Amish in Durango for a good old fashioned barn raising.

He and Katie were going to a kill the keg party that night for a post wedding celebration with the ulterior motive of recruiting some folks to raise the shed the next day. After a few beers, and coaxing from me, we decided to recruit a couple neighbors and raise it ourselves right then and there.

A couple quick phone calls and the next thing I know, a tractor comes trundling up the driveway followed by another neighborhood across the road and we got to it. I am glad that we didn’t recruit a bunch of people to come all the way out to the property. As expected, it all went without a hitch. Getting the posts up and crossbeams in took all of 45 minutes and 4 people was plenty to get the job done.

 

 

We even had time to head into town for the keg party. Much more fun when you don’t have an ulterior motive of recruiting people to help build yourself a house.

We were lucky that we didn’t wait because the weather turned rainy overnight. I decided to head out in the morning for drier weather but I am looking forward to getting back to check on the timber framing and spending more time in Southwest Colorado

 

I checked in via text a couple months later and Nick sent me a picture of how the shed was coming along.

 

 

I think it looks really good. Note the Don Miller Memorial Side Shed for keeping firewood dry. I doubt that Nick really calls it that but it was my idea so I am lobbying for the credit. :-).