After getting settled in the bus we started dealing with landscaping and along with that came the need for a place to store garden tools and supplies, so I started hounding Gary for a garden shed. We decided on a spot behind bus that would be close by and convenient. He began building a garden shed in the winter of 2008. The photos below show our progress. Some of the photo have captions that you can see by hoovering over them. 

Me to Gary, "Stop! I've got an idea. This is way to nice to be a garden shed and it would make a great guest house. I can keep garden tools underneath. So lets close in that back covered potting deck and make it a bedroom." He thinks this is an OK idea and works on enclosing the back. 

Now we're into November and it's time to close up and head to Rochester to work in the store for the holiday season.

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It's February 2009 and we're back to work on the "Guest House." A cold and snowy, but beautiful,  start to the winter. A good deal of progress was made on finishing off the exterior. The next step was lots of tedious insulating, wiring, plumbing. Very tiring. 

Back at it in 2010. Oh, but wait. I forgot to tell you that at some point we decided that the cabin was really cool and that we should live in that and make the bus the guest house. So this meant adding a full kitchen and of course we needed a nice deck for outdoor entertaining. And maybe some nice raised planters and a back walkway to the bus. 

The majority of the outdoor work was done by the winter of 2011 so most of that year was spent on interior work. I don't have many pictures of the inside construction. We found a cool old hosier in Spruce Pine and spent some time refinishing it for the kitchen.

Spring of 2012 and were were ready to move from the bus to the cabin. The main interior part of the cabin is approximately 600 sq.ft. There is one big room that encompasses the living area and kitchen shown below, plus a screened front porch. 

The bedroom and bathroom are separated from the main room by French doors. The cabinet with four small hanging lamps over the top is the headboard for the bed. Gary used bark, purchased from The Bark House in Spruce Pine, for the facing of the cabinet. The stick valences and curtains are my touch. ​

On the front of the cabin was a wonderful screened in front porch.. This was favorite spot to sit have dinner. That's our Jackson napping in the chair. We had six dogs at the time. We have since made changes and this is now our dining room.

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It didn't take long for us to decide we needed to cover the front deck and probably best if it was screened in. Gary had to figure out how to add a roof, etc. to make this happen since it was not part of the original plan. We put up a temporary tent to cover his tools while he worked on the covered screen porch. More tools and supplies were kept in our box trailer. Tractor came in handy for many things. By January 2013 the front porch was covered and screened.

The front porch became a wood shop while Gary working on finishing the inside of the room. He had lots of company. 

By mid April of 2013 the front porch was ready for use and it quickly became of primary place to hang out. Screens were replace with windows so it could be used year round which increased our living space by 225 sq. ft. 

In 2017 we removed the wall between this porch and the inside of the cabin and this is now our living room. You can see details of this transformation on our 2017 Adding a Living Room page.

Spring of 2014 we added added a stone patio with fire pit in front of the porch which made our cabin pretty much complete.