Vashon House

In my early childhood, I built “camps” and “forts” and “houses” out in the woods surrounding our neighborhood. Perhaps because I’m a Cancer, I always had a keen sense of wanting to have a homebase, my own “place” in the world. When I graduated from college, I rode an interesting wave: the hippie,back-to-the-land, boot-leg house building wave. It was a phenomenon that existed for a brief nano-second in history, and influenced my entire life. To fuel the habit, I invented and developed my own building demolition business. Over the years, I tore down, literally, dozens of houses and buildings by hand. I would stockpile the salvage material, eventually tally up the stash, and then sit down and draw plans for what I could build with the stuff at hand. I wound up, over thirty years, building six different houses, working solo, and entirely from recycled material. It was a great joy to me. That I was skilled at drafting and technical drawing, was absolutely essential to the process. This house on Vashon Island, was my first house. I worked on it for about ten years. Like all my houses, I worked solo, pounding every nail and cutting every board.