This website is a first for me; I'm quite computer-savvy but have never needed a website before.  Weebly seemed to be a popular and convenient website builder, and it's FREE, so I jumped in.  Hopefully this experimental site will satisfy all your online needs!  Feedback is always welcome, so if you have comments please email me at [email protected]!

As you may notice, I will be adding 'historical' blog posts to this story page, and they will be posted according to the dates they refer to rather than to when I write them, and I will try to write chronologically.  So, be aware of new posts!

Laura & I purchased the acreage in 2004.  We had both grown up in rural settings, and we were expecting our first child in October so we searched the Steinbach area for a lot - I wanted to get away from Red River Valley flooding and those pesky beavers that kept gnawing down my Mom's trees in the Morris area.  This particular lot had been logged it the early '90's, so while tall trees still ringed the outer edges, most of our new yard was dense with young poplar, elm, maple, and other native plants.  I scouted out the tallest trees and marked the native fruits - saskatoons (which did great in '04), white-flowering plums, cranberries, hazelnuts, wild strawberries and wild raspberries (big ones).  It wasn't much to look at from a "development" point of view, and my dear wife wondered if we'd ever get things sorted out - dense 'young' growth everywhere.  And all that poison ivy...

Laura's Dad helped me plan the driveway, literally hacking through the mini-forest with machetes.  He got poison ivy.  We found a good spot for the future house, I spotted an area for the garden, where the plant life appeared particularly vigorous, and marked some trees to keep (I'm a sucker for nice MB maple climbing trees).  Then my Dad came out with the Caterpillar RC-50 front-end loader and cleared out an area so I could plan my dream home.

Having perfectionist tendencies, I custom-designed a house, and we hired Hillside Construction to be our general contractors.  I wanted to have an energy-efficient home, with passive-solar windows, geothermal heat exchange with integrated floor heating in the basement, and I even designed the wide portion of our roof to face South, just in case solar panels would someday become viable.  Hillside managed to preserve a few of those climbing maples near the house, which was great, and by January 1, 2005 we moved in to our new home with our 3-month old baby.  My Dad let me use the RC-50 and I spent many hours moving boulders, clearing trees, and making little hiking trails through the forest.  I am an explorer at heart, and I was in my glory!