The old timber-framing pieces were the first to arrive on site. The logs wouldn’t arrive for another few weeks.

I’ve seen a lot of anxious homeowners at this stage. A good bit of money has been spent on what looks like a confusing pile of dirty lumber.

But for me, someone who has seen plenty of “piles” during my career, I can’t stop smiling when I see this sight before me.

It’s better than Disney World to a child.

Originally posted 2015-07-05 17:07:31.

Once the plans were drawn, it was time to start digging.

Beyond a doubt this was my most challenging basement to dig with so much rock to break loose and remove.

Who would have thought that a mountain would be made of stone? 😉

Originally posted 2015-07-05 14:18:40.

This building was my first jobsite upon starting my business.

I lovingly referred to the structure as “the Shop”. She was an empty shell of a her former self when I knew her. On the inside her timber-framing was exposed for all to see. The store’s fixtures had been stripped out long ago.

I understand that back in the late 1800’s she was a general store. Once a bustling center of commerce but for the next few years it would be just her and me.

You can see my brand new truck setting out front of the shop, the only new vehicle I’ve ever purchased for myself. Well… I should say it was new… in 1988… I still drive that same truck today. I’ve got 450,000 miles on her now. We’ve both put on a few miles, and a few years.

On the other side of the truck you will see what was the rental house I was living in at the time. Inside that house was my lovely wife and my three children, all under the age of five. She had her hands full. My job was to provide for them all.

At the time this photo was taken I had left the employment of my previous job, working for another contractor, to start my own business. I had no work lined up, at all. I had just enough savings set aside to pay my bills for a month, maybe two. But I had faith it would work out, and just enough fear to keep me energized.

Each workday I would get up early, pack my lunch and walk the 40 steps to my Shop. There I would build sawhorses and benches, sharpen tools, and make phone calls.

I managed to find enough work that first year to keep the lights on. The next year I would build a log cabin that would find itself onto the cover of Country Living. And two years after that, I would build a home for my family and would leave this Shop behind. It was a bittersweet farewell.

She still stands there, tall and proud, I’m thankful to say.

I always drive slow when I pass her by and reflect on that period in my life. There I was cold, and broke, and scared… and so alive, anxious for what was to come.

Originally posted 2015-07-02 12:21:47.

We once built a timber-frame work studio for a young potter.

Her budget was extremely tight, but she wanted to practice her handcraft within a building that was handcrafted.

I appreciated that way of thinking.

We all pitched in, gathered up an inexpensive pile of “big sticks “from the local sawmill, and then had some fun for a couple of weeks.

Originally posted 2015-06-24 10:55:34.

I stumbled across and an old article that was in the Washington Post about my company… there are a few errors, but I thought you might enjoy the read…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/realestate/1996/09/21/cabin-fever-builds-in-the-blue-ridge/ee054213-61ca-4510-b08f-7dd39dd83bb8/

CABIN FEVER BUILDS IN THE BLUE RIDGE
By Maryann Haggerty September 21, 1996

The snakes, bees and mice don’t bother him, but Noah Bradley just can’t get used to the baby buzzards.

Buzzards don’t build nests, but instead lay their eggs and raise their young in out-of-the-way places, such as the floors of abandoned farmhouses. Since Bradley tromps through a lot of decrepit, empty houses and barns in rural Virginia and West Virginia, it’s hard to avoid disturbing the baby birds and hearing their screams.

“The noise is somewhere between a bobcat and a ghost,” he said. “It’s a very creepy howl. I have yet to hear it that it didn’t scare me.”

And it’s not just the sound. “And they’re ugly, just the grossest things. And they throw up at you — they have a range, I can testify, of at least 20 feet.”

Bradley, 39, operates Blue Mountain Builders from a house he built himself on the outskirts of this tiny Blue Ridge town in Madison County, about 95 miles from Washington. The small firm — Bradley and a crew of about eight — takes down old houses and rebuilds them for modern living, with kitchens, indoor plumbing and other amenities uncommon in 19th century log cabins.

“I imagine there are some people who would like the structures to be left exactly as they are . . . but there aren’t a lot of people who want that,” Bradley said. “People want amenities. I think it’s better to save what you can and bring it up to modern living.”

Most of his clients are upper-income people who want a weekend home in the country. “If you looked at the land records, I’d bet half of Madison County is owned by Northern Virginians,” he said.

In the eight years since he founded the company, Blue Mountain has built or renovated about 50 homes in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge, Bradley said. About half have been log cabins, with the rest a mix of other construction, including one 11-sided chestnut silo.

In some cases the buildings are simply moved from previous locations. More often, they’re a mix of old materials, such as stone from one home’s old chimney or pine from another’s floors.

Prices also vary widely — Blue Mountain won’t set a contract price upfront. Because of the vagaries of old materials, Bradley and his crew aren’t sure what exact costs will be until they actually build.

He has charged less than $50,000 for some of his very small cabins, while some of his larger houses have cost $200,000 or more.

Despite the baby buzzards, it’s a way of life Bradley loves, in a place he loves. “For some strange reason, I’ve pulled it off,” he said recently as he drove his pickup truck along back roads on a tour of falling down and rebuilt houses.

Bradley was born in Richmond and lived there until he was 15, when his father moved the family to the country and began building his own house.

“After working with my dad, I decided construction was not the thing for me. It made me study real hard in school,” said Bradley, who earned an information systems degree from Virginia Commonwealth University and got a computer job.

“But then I began to read too many back issues of Mother Earth News,” he said.

Bradley and his wife, Lynne, decided to return to the land. They bought 15 acres in the Tennessee backwoods, plowed their garden with a horse and built a house with their own hands from salvaged materials.

“I considered myself the last hippie,” he said. Al l the real hippies, a few years older, already had come and gone from that part of Tennessee.

For three years the Bradleys didn’t own an alarm clock. “I was the most peaceful person,” he said. Then — “you got it!” — their first child was born. “There were bills and responsibilities.”

The couple decided they wanted to raise their children more or less as they had been raised, in a stable middle-class home, close to her parents in Northern Virginia and his in Richmond.

There are three children now, ages 8, 10 and 12, and are home-schooled by Lynne Bradley in the house they built in 1992.

That house is a small museum of country building techniques. The side room is old logs, built in the style of the late 1700s. The living room is post-and-beam construction, salvaged from a Richmond house built about 1810.

Most of the kitchen where the children study dates to the 1920s, with a big picture window from an old general store and a sink from a church. Noah Bradley’s grandfather made the desk in Lynne Bradley’s office.

Of all the houses Blue Mountain has built, it’s the only one that’s lived in full-time year-round, Noah Bradley said. The rest are weekend getaways or houses to which people intend to retire.

Until about six months ago the company operated with an informal version of what big corporations call “just-in-time inventory” — that is, Bradley was able to find just about the right amount of old materials to complete jobs underway.

Lately, he said, he has been inundated with old houses. When he has the money, he buys the homes. Materials abound, such as the logs from a West Virginia cabin, which are stacked at the bottom of his driveway under a blue tarp.

Nearby, his crew is renotching logs from an Appomattox County tobacco barn and setting up a cabin to help prospective customers visualize what they’re buying.

Boards from yet another old house are stacked in a trailer, ready to be trucked to a site if someone wants the materials.

“I’m a week-to-week kind of guy, but I own 12 houses. The only thing is I don’t own the land,” Bradley said.

But he added, “I’m getting concerned. I don’t have the financial resources to stockpile 50 houses, but if I don’t buy them, they get burned down. History’s being lost here.”

That matters to Bradley, who can rhapsodize about an old board and considers log cabins built from kits — one of the more popular types of rural construction — just plain ug\ly.

And he is able to look beyond a home’s exterior, such as the 1880s house he bought near the town of Uno. From the outside the house looks like a firetrap. “The thing with old houses is you have to see the potential in them,” Bradley said.

In the house, he said, “Underneath the ticky-tacky vinyl siding is heart-of-pine siding.”

The house’s frame is no good, he said, and most of its floorboards are gone. But the pine mantelpiece is lovely, he said, and the staircase, with its curving railing, would cost $10,000 to build new.

“And my favorite part of the whole house is the door. I just love this door,” he said, showing off a big double front door with glass sidelights and detailed trim.

The houses Blue Mountain builds are as varied as the sites, materials and owners. A sizable two-story cabin owned by a Northern Virginia doctor, just outside Criglersville, is built of logs from a West Virginia cabin. There “wasn’t near enough rock” for the big fireplace and chimney the owner wanted, so that came from elsewhere.

And to make the best of the stunning view of Doubletop mountain, the owner wanted big porches, which Bradley built from rough-sawed lumberyard oak.

The cabin, which has been featured in Country Living magazine, has the feel of a hunting lodge. “This is the only house I’ve built that is masculine,” Bradley said. “I never call it she.”

Just a few miles away is a 20-foot-wide cabin, with a living room, kitchen and bath downstairs and a master bedroom upstairs, that Bradley repeatedly describes as “cute.”

For owner Marise Craig of Prince William County, who spends just about every weekend there with her husband, Bill, the little cabin is “our escape from the rat race up here.”

Craig calls Bradley talented and honest, and said working with him was “a very, very positive experience.”

She said, “I relied on Noah a lot for how he felt it should look. Yes, that cabin is our cabin, but it’s also Noah’s cabin.”

Bradley describes himself as a “complete Type-B personality” with a “whipped puppy’s” attitude toward conflict.

But he also has an artist’s stubbornness about doing things the way he thinks they should be done, Craig said. The original plans for her cabin called for two windows on the main fireplace wall, but after construction started Bradley didn’t want to build the second window because he didn’t think it looked right. Craig had wanted the second window for added light.

In the end, there is no second window and Craig is perfectly happy with what she got.

Takoma Park resident Jim Epstein, whose family has worked with Bradley on several projects, said, “He has clear ideas about what he wants to build.”

Sometimes, Epstein said, that results in conflict between the aesthetic and the practical — and that’s a good thing. “It’s great; it’s a dynamic tension worth having.”

For example, one family cabin sits atop a mountain, with a far-reaching view of the valleys below.

Epstein said his family wanted porches facing the view, while Bradley would have preferred turning the structure so its stone chimney was visible from the main approach, presenting a view of its own to those outside rather than those inside.

This time, the owners won.

Epstein said his family plans to continue to work with Blue Mountain, because Bradley’s attitude to building meshes with their attitude toward a treasured place.

“Noah is a traditionalist. He has an extraordinary love for wood and logs. He loves the stories about every aspect of the cabin,” Epstein said. “Everything has this great history to it, and he loves that aspect of it, and that’s very infectious,” Epstein said. CAPTION: Blue Mountain Builders owner Noah Bradley built this two-story log cabin near Criglersville, Va., for a Northern Virginia physician.

Originally posted 2015-06-22 20:55:09.

Years ago I was offered the opportunity to salvage this fine horse barn.

I declined.

I liked it where it was.

I’m proud to say that she still stands there today.

Originally posted 2015-06-22 13:59:09.

The temptation is strong to build a retaining wall whenever we have a bounty of nice stone. We gave in to that temptation on this project.

Originally posted 2015-06-22 13:11:26.

I’d like to point out a couple of things here in this photo…

Have you noticed that the angled pitch of the shoulders of a chimney always matches the pitch of the roof above it?

Well, at least that’s the way they have been done historically… but I’ve seen many new homes completely ignore this little detail.

Also notice the salvaged limestone rocks that we have used to build this chimney. Limestone comes out the ground black in color but quickly develops a patina of light grey.

The process of salvaging and shaping this recycled stone has exposed some of that blackness… which disappeared in just a couple of years.

Originally posted 2015-06-22 12:53:54.

We once restored an old farmhouse over in the Shenandoah Valley near Harrisonburg.

Among other details… we put a red roof on her.

Originally posted 2015-06-22 12:20:24.

My windowsill… this photo was taken last July.

That’s fake snow on the window, and a fake evergreen branch, and a fake tree outside with fake snow on it.

Oh those sales catalogs… is nothing real in them?

Originally posted 2015-06-06 22:33:20.