Thanks Jono,

I'll be honest for a long time I "invested" my discretionary income in toys like sports cars and motorcycles and that was a lot of fun, building them and restoring them, and I made some nice profits on them and had a lot of fun doing it, none of it was long term.

Then on one of our many motorcycle trips together, Mrs. Irish and I were riding around looking at some cabins in the mountains and thinking "Wouldn't it be nice to have one of those..." We'll of course my thinking was, "No way we could ever afford something like that." Of course if you know much about women you'd know that women don't think that way. She was thinking we could actually do it!

I can't tell you how many trips we made to North Georgia and Northeast Alabama looking at land only to have Mrs. Irish go... "No, I don't really like it..." Until we finally lucked into this piece of property and simply got a hell of a deal on it. It took me 53 years and the help of a good woman to get focused to get something like this and it has taken me another 2 years to finally start to get something built other than the tiny cabin. It is still a long row to hoe and we are hoping to have everything finished up, doing most of the work ourselves by Thanksgiving 2017.

We want to get it finished while our parents are still able to enjoy it with us. They're all in their early 80's...

I can tell you from experience if you want to do something like this, you have to really start focusing on it and saving up for it, and then once you can scrape together enough money, start looking hard. There are deals on land out there, but it takes a lot of looking. And then once you find it and buy it, it takes a lot of hard work. I have to be careful when we are up there and schedule short days of work and leave plenty of time to relax and have fun, because I don't want to get Mrs. Irish burned out. She's a good helper, but she has her limits... And it's up to me as a good husband to know what those are...

Thanks for the nice post, you should come up and visit us one day on a weekend and Mrs. Irish and I will give you and your wife a tour and we can talk about land and such.