Hey Ya'll,

I've done this website so that our friends who ask "what do you do all day down there" can get a glimpse of our life and keep up with our latest projects. We also wanted a personal journal so we can remember all this in our rapidly approaching old age. Plus, I love doing websites and want to maintain and improve that skill.  As the Alan Jackson song says, "I'm a simple girl myself, grew up on long island". Yes, I did grow up on Long Island. Gary, my husband/partner, and I lived in cities until moving to these beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains so this is a big change.   We visited this area annually to spend time with close friends. Penland School is what brought us and our friends to this area in the 70's. 

We were avid RV'ers until moving here and spent a great deal of time traveling and living in our RV. Gary always wanted to convert a classic Eagle bus into a luxury coach so in 2003 we started that project. At that time our primary residence was Rochester, NY where we had an American craft gallery called Craft Company No.6.  In addition to Craft Company we had two other galleries called American Details, one in Coconut Grove, Florida and the other in Buffalo, NY.  We spent the winter months in Key Largo to be close to the Coconut Grove store and then usually took a trip out west in the late spring.  After closing American Details we moved our RV base to Hilton Head Island, SC where we owned a beautiful site on the water. The decision to do the bus conversion is what brought us to the Penland area. Gary needed a spot where he could have a wood-shop in a reasonably mild climate. Our good friends offered us the use of their guest house for living and Gary found a shop space close by. It took him 3 years to complete the bus. During those years we had come to love this area and decided to look for a small piece of land as a home base for the bus and part-time residence for us.

The small piece of land ended up being 8+ acres which is not small for someone who lived on city lots or RV sites their entire life. We are animal lovers and have always had two dogs who traveled with us everywhere. Probably the most important criteria in choosing a piece of land was safety for our dogs and a spot where they could roam freely. Also important was a nice view, privacy and good sun. Our land is at the end of the road in a beautiful "holler" and slopes up rather steeply to the mountain ridge. We named our land Houndhill in honor of our Basset Hound at the time, Buddy Ray. 

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We moved our newly converted bus onto Houndhill in the spring of 2006 and started on taming our land which was half wooded and half a tangled mess of weeds, invasive multi flora rose, blackberry, green brier and poison ivy. We still had our gallery in Rochester and lived here about half the year, with Gary spending more time here than me. In February of 2013 we moved here full time after selling our business. You can learn more about out progress and projects by looking at the other pages of this site. I also plan to start a gardening/land-taming blog and one about Gary's latest building project. The links at the top of this page will lead you to other pages. Some of the pages have sub-pages listed under the head link. 

If you wish to contact us please feel free to email lynn@gonecountry.me. We are happy to share information about gardening, building, rural living and dogs. We are Lynn Allinger and Gary Stam.