We Nearly did it all

It all started many years ago as an accident, a foolish one perhaps but I thought we could build a house using old power poles for the basic frame. One day it would be an "A" frame, the next a log type. The design changed often depending on my energies and perhaps where I was working at the time. One might ask what did where I worked have to do with the design but sometimes there would be a lot of used poles available to me and at the next place there wouldn't be any.

Then while working in the Columbia Basin for an electric cooperative I saw what truly inspired me. A new customer was building a pole framed home and that was a "Ah-hah" moment and I said we can do that . Many hours were spent on researching how other people had done it and how our customer was doing it. He actually had a contractor that called himself, "The Housesmith" which I thought was very catchy. We didn't feel we needed a contractor and that decision was actually mostly mine. So for weeks whenever we removed an old pole, if it was any good, I delivered it to the lot we had purchased. As the pile grew, our design slowly developed and soon we began the actual digging of holes to place the poles in. This was no small chore as the ground was hard and there was a ledge down about 4' to 6' feet depening where you were on our lot.

Our small town was east of Mt. St. Helens and on May 18, 1981 when she blew her top we actually had about 6 poles set. The eruption was a very weird experience to go through. The eruption occurred about 9:30 on a Sunday morning while we were in Church and when word got to our leaders they sent us home and by noon the sky was totally blacked out And it wasn't until about 6:00 pm that there was any light in the sky at all and then was perhaps like a half hour before sunrise so it wasn't very light.