By Virginia (Ginny) Neish – Abbotsford, B.C.
Bob and I moved to an eight-acre hobby farm in Raymore, Sask., back in 1980. We spent the first few months living in a small trailer while we completely remodelled the house. It had been moved onto a new basement prior to our relocation.
For months before moving, we’d hauled many flatbed trailers. They were loaded with lumber, windows, doors, and other building materials that Bob salvaged from an old house in Grand Coulee near Regina.
New material was used for remodelling the house. The two-vehicle garage, summer kitchen, and eventually a workshop, were all constructed from those piles of recycled lumber.
Later, Bob wanted to build a hip-roofed barn. He got permission to tear down a large old farmhouse on the half section south of us, as well as a large farm building north of us. The lumber and other things salvaged from those two projects went into the construction of the barn.
The stairway to the loft was finished and would have become a ‘Train Room’ for the large collection of HO trains and accessories Bob had accumulated. The stairway was nicer than the stairs in the house.
The house stairs were covered with recycled carpeting, taken from the living room when we remodelled the house. Nothing was ever thrown away. Sometimes we’d sit for hours straightening nails.
I moved off the farm in 1994. There were still a few piles of lumber, windows and doors, buckets of nails, and electrical and plumbing ‘stuff’ that were sold or given away.
Those were the happiest 15 years of my life.
