It is raining nice and steady today. It will help the garden. This reminds me of the time I was preparing to do my first house project. It was a particularly rainy year and I was worried that when I was ready to start building the weather would hold me up.

I was collecting house building information from every place I could find it. This was during the era of ignorance before computers and the internet. I bought and borrowed books and magazines, got subscriptions to the best ones, and read them over and over. If I didn’t have firsthand experience at least I would have some knowledge, and references to the information I would need. The rain gave me incentive to study.

Then something happened that I took as a great omen and boosted my hopes that I could actually succeed in building a house. It rained so much that spring that there was serious flooding. In Vermont that means brooks swelling to rivers moving very fast down through the hills. The floods washed out bridges. Buildings next to usually placid streams, even a whole lumber yard at a mill, floated away.

It so happens my little house was on property near a 600 acre lake. I was safely high enough to stay dry, though the roads coming and going from there were washed out for a few days. It was an exciting time. We were declared a disaster area and a great time was had by all.

About three weeks after the flood waters subsided I walked down to the lake. The area where the river enters the lake had been one of my favorite places to visit. It was devastated. However, the devastation turned out to be a godsend. Every tree that had held its ground snagged huge piles of logs, boards, beams, bridge timbers, all that lumber from the washed out mill and much more. When I saw this I had one of those moments when your whole body quivers like it would if you had just won the lottery big time.

There was so much treasure I called up two friends who had been thinking about building their own homes and we spent a month collecting materials from that area. Three houses were built from that collection of goodies with tons of stuff left over. And it was quality lumber. I got a 14″ square by ten foot long hand-hewn beam for the mantel over my fireplace. There was 2000 square feet of 2 1/2″ thick tongue and groove yellow pine flooring. There were so many 4″ x 8″ mill-sawn bridge timbers one guy built a whole cabin with them. Lumber of every dimension was so plentiful we were picky about what we chose.

Unfortunately, word got out about what we were doing and the town fathers kicked us out, hired a contractor, bulldozed the remaining treasure into piles and burned it. They said it was done to clear the water shed area for safety during the next flood. Hogwash!!

However, we weren’t dumb. After finding all the places on the map where similar land/water relationships existed we roamed the countryside, gathering more materials. The locations weren’t as productive but we weren’t wasting our time.

So, Lesson One: arrange your money. Lesson Two: study hard. Lesson Three: pray for rain. I’m kidding. Lesson Three: look for deals on things you will need. You will be doing all this and more during Year One of your homemade Ph.D.