The Compound

Author: Tommy Jordan

  • Course Correction – Shift it into Drive

    Course Correction – Shift it into Drive

    This is just a personal post. It’s not about the Compound, or anything related, but since Amy and I decided to build the new site the goal is to have all the videos, blogs, articles, how-to materials and basically everything here in one place. So, I’m writing it here.

    Today is one of those days where I was finally able to pull my head out of my ass and see the world the way it really is, not the way it’s been in my mind these past three weeks or so. Oh, so NOW you’re interested huh? Well, read on. Maybe you’ll find it helpful.

    I realized about 15 minutes ago that its mild depression. The problem with depression is that you can rarely see it when you’re in the middle of it. It can lull your senses. It’s like that gentle rocking motion in the back seat of the car when you’re on a long trip. Time just rolls by without your conscious acklowledgement of it. Your head lolls against the window and you drift in and out of awareness. You drove by hundreds of interesting things. You “saw” none of them.

    That’s the kind of depression I tend to suffer from. Compared to others it’s fairly mild, so I’m blessed in that regard, but its effect is the same. The problem is its so subtle others that know you don’t recognize it. You don’t recognize it. If you’re not careful you’ll fall asleep and you don’t wake up until the moment the brakes screech and you’re heading straight for a brick wall you can’t avoid.

    As has happened more that once in my life, I owe this particular realization to my friend Bill Stovall. It wasn’t an active thing he did, but he deserves the credit nonetheless.

    I’m one of six people in the world Bill chose to share his new book “The Ledger Never Lies” with. I’ve known Bill for 25 years now and he respects my input as someone to give feedback, so it’s an honor for me to be able to be part of the process with him.

    Out of respect for Bill, his hard work, and his upcoming book, I’m not going to go into the “ah ha! moment” but while sitting here proofreading his book this morning it just clicked in my mind. The gears were starting to rust in place. Small debris was clogging my mind’s mental processes. Some days the desires, the determination, the “chutzpah” would just try to grind just a bit and then hit some tension and just seize back up again and freeze. That’s what my brain has been like this past month. I just didn’t know it until this morning. So thanks Bill for being my mental WD-40 this morning. Or maybe that should be BS-40?

    There’s the code name for your series when you decide to write more than one! lol.

    Anyway, Bill has a speaking style, a diction, and a delivery that just clicks with people. Reading his words this morning, and considering I’ve known him as a friend for 25 years, I can hear how he says it when I read the words from the page. They sound like Bill in my head when I’m reading. The way he stops on a certain part of a sentence. Its usually a statement that’s really a question. He’s got this thing where he’ll cock one eyebrow, and his head kind of bobs a bit… like he’s waiting for you to make the connection he’s already made. It’s infuriating if you’re trying to argue with him. Don’t ever do that. It’s a miserable experience you won’t ever win.

    But today, as I was sitting here in ratty “I just woke up” clothes I remembered I needed to finish proofreading his book. After another chapter or two, my moment of clarity happened and I just leaned back in my chair and thought “Well, shit.”

    And then I got up to take a shower.

    I remember something Bill taught me when I worked for him at Electrolux over twenty years ago.

    “When you look good, you feel good.”

    I’ve always found that to be true once it was explained to me. If you’re having one of those days where nothing wants to work, you have no motivation, you don’t want to do any of the things you know you need to do, go take a shower and put on some better clothes. Style your hair. Put on a collared shirt (or whatever your equivalent is). Look at yourself in the mirror for a moment when you’re done. See that person? Yeah, that’s a much better put-together person. That’s a person that can get things done. Now I’m that guy today.

    I just need to wake up and be that guy again tomorrow. That’s the challenge.

    Learning to analyze yourself

    Throughout my life I’ve always considered myself a fairly self-aware person. Maybe I’d go so far as to say empathic, but that word gets overused and rarely in the correct manner, so I tend not to use it. But regardless of the word, the “thing” is still there. I’ve always been good at reading people. I didn’t go to school for it. I didn’t choose to study it. I just have a gift of it and I consider it a great blessing.

    That’s partly why I think I make friends faster than other people. Now that I’ve said that, I don’t think I’ve ever put those two thoughts together before, but it really DOES make perfect sense. I can meet someone one time, spend 30 minutes with them, and the next thing you know I’m calling them to take a motorcycle ride, or come over for a drink, or meeting for lunch to hang out. Most people don’t do that from my experience.

    Its a combination of body language, confidence, and “how” they say what they’re saying. I just have a great bullshit detector. So when I meet someone I can usually get a reading on them within 5 minutes and know if this is a person I want to do business with, someone I can trust to do work without a down-payment, someone I want to hire, someone that’s going to look out for me as much as I’d look out for them, or someone I’d just want to hang out with and learn from, or just spend time chatting over coffee.

    It’s always played out well in my relationships as well. I can read my wife like a book most of the time. I’ll know she’s depressed before she does. I can tell when she’s hungry, or hangry, and know when to get the hell out of the way if it’s the latter. I can tell when she’s approaching a breaking point mentally or emotionally most of the time. It’s not foolproof, trust me, but it works I’d say about 80% of the time.

    It’s the same with other friends. My grandfather would call it reading what’s behind their eyes, not what’s coming out of their mouth. I don’t know if it’s a learned skill or just a thing I’ve got, but it’s a tool I’ve used most of my life on other people without conscious thought.

    Its funny how I can be so accurate with other people’s emotions yet be blind as hell to my own though huh?

    Learning to analyze myself was something I didn’t start to take seriously until my late 30s. As we get older our minds just get more complex. Experiences we have that younger people don’t build repetitious patterns we learn to recognize in life and we can see them from the viewpoint of past experience and better predict how something will go. It’s why older business people tend to make better business decisions than young entrepreneurs. They’ve got the experience the younger ones don’t. They possess the empirical evidence from experiences that were succesful, as well as the ones that weren’t successful, and they can apply that law of averages to the idea before them and know whether it’s a good idea or not better than a young person can that hasn’t done it twenty times over the years.

    The words that describe how my brain works didn’t exist when I was younger. And even if they did, the testing that reveals it didn’t exist.

    There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m a bit neurodivergent. I’m not going to go into the deep details of neurodivergence. You can look it up if you’re curious, but the short version is my brain works differently that most “normal” people. My brain is divergent from the norm. Hence, neurodivergent.

    It can manifest a hundred ways and it can be incredibly small ways or it can be large obvious ones that anyone can recognize. Autism and it’s spectrum is a good example. Autism is ONE type of neurodivergence.

    I think that if I were tested for all the possible ways autism could be determined, I would probably ping in a few minor areas, but not many and not in a way that’s obvious to anyone else. It’s just how my brain works. I’m really good with spatial math, but I need visuals. I can walk into a building and start calculating cabling needs, square footage, wall heights, door spacings, all kinds of things that pertain to my job or to my love of carpentry, but I have to SEE the thing to do that. I can’t do that with blueprints. And I do this kind of thing quietly in my mind all the time. I know, for example, that there are 800 screws exactly in the headers and footers of my walls at the new shop. I know there are 20 ladder studs. I know the way trusses are built and walls are built, and to what codes, and the siding height – all of which tell me the exact interior dimensions of my roof square footage. I did that in my head yesterday with a few glances in about 1 minute because I needed to calculate the interior requirements for insulation. Keep in mind I’m the same guy that will spend 4 hours trying to fix a QuickBooks glitch that someone else could maybe fix in 5 minutes. My mind just works differently.

    And look, another rabbit hole…

    This article has literally NO pre-defined goal in its writing, so you’re just along for the ride ok? We’ll see where we end up at the end.

    In terms of what kind of neurodivergence I have, there are a few I’m aware of. I have slight OCD tendencies, yet my office can be messy as hell for months on end. But.. that drawer of screwdriver bits? They’re completely organized and ordered by size. I know exactly how many USB-C cables I have, yet I have no idea where I left my belt when I took it off last night. (My wife informed me – it was in the laundry room. Apparently I took my clothes off there last night. I have absolutely no memory of doing that or even being in that room, but apparently I was.)

    The OCD is great for what I do for a living. My cabling is always straight. It’s not “kinda” straight. It’s freakin straight. My patch panel layouts are picture-perfect. My labelling schemes are well thought-out and in two decades of doing this I’ve had to correct them maybe twice in all the years. I can “see” things down the road that affect my work that other trades just don’t think about and resolve them even before I get started working… as long as I can SEE the place first. General contractors that I work with for the first time hate me because I tear apart their architect’s horrible designs in a matter of minutes. But, in the end, I’m right about 105% of the time and I saved them money. It’s why in over two decades we’re the only company I know of anywhere that’s never had a punch list. (for those that aren’t aware, a punch list is the list the contractor gives you when you say your work is done and they have someone that goes around looking for your mistakes to have you come back and fix them. That’s literally never happened to us, ever.)

    The OCD can also be a big negative thing in life as well. People that are OCD are very habit forming. Smoking was a habit. Drinking coffee is a habit. Vaping is a habit. The way I setup the phone chargers and spare cables in my vehicles is a habit. It’s a GOOD habit, but it’s still a habit. You think I’m kidding? My freakin’ tractors have phone chargers and phone cradles installed and I was really stuck the other day deciding whether I wanted to put one in the side-by-side or not.

    I’m aware that I’m VERY prone to forming habits. My morning routine is locked in at home. It’s something I’ve been wanting to change for years but I’m mostly unable because by the time I realize it, I’m already mid-process.

    I get up, stumble to the kitchen with no clothes on. I set the coffee cup in the coffee maker the night before so it’s there and ready for me because in my mind I don’t want to “waste time” looking for it. I have to let the dogs out to pee every morning if I’m the first one up, but instead of letting them out first, I step over to the coffee bot, hit the power button, press the coffee button, press the 10 oz button, and press Start – all BEFORE I take the three steps to open the door and usher the three dogs outside. Why do I do that? Because it means the 20 seconds I spend getting all three dogs outside is 20 seconds faster my coffee cup will be ready for me. I’m saving time. That’s literally my mental motivation. Let’s not waste time, no sir!

    Then I proceed to sit at my computer, scroll Facebook, scroll the news, and read emails for an hour….

    Yeah, so why the mental priority on saving those 20 seconds making the coffee? No reason except it’s how my mind works. It’s my OCD doing it’s thing.

    Now that I’m at the computer, my ADHD kicks in. If you really want to mess with a guy with ADHD, give him almost unlimited computer processing power and triple monitors…

    I want to to be at the Compound tomorrow morning at 7 AM. I get up at 6, drink coffee, do the dog thing, and… shit… it’s 8:30 before I even go get a shower. Damn it!

    Why? Because my ADHD had me scrolling through Facebook videos when I just intended to see what the first few feeds were. Then I clicked on an ad about carpentry. Then I’m off on another website learning why I just HAVE to have this new router table setup. Now I’m thinking about woodworking. I wonder what kind of wood I’d need for so and so. Do I have that at the Compound? I bet I do! I mean I could build a kiln to dry my own pine tree lumber. I wonder how hard it is to built a chainsaw mill. I might need to sharpen my chainsaws. Yeah, they definitely need to be sharpened, ya know, just in case. I need to get on the tractor and run through the woods and see if I can find a…..and damn… my whole morning plan is shot to hell.

    Let’s not forget I had a plan to be at the Compound at 7 AM. I’ll be lucky to get there by 10:00.

    Fighting Drift

    So now you know a little of how my brain works. It’s a mess in there. Be warned. It can also be a deviant dark ass place, but we’re not putting all THAT out here on the internet.

    So I’m slightly neurodivergent and I have OCD and some ADHD tendencies. (Notice I didn’t say I “suffer” from OCD or ADHD. I don’t. There ARE people that seriously struggle with severe versions of these conditions and I don’t mean to take away anything regarding what they have to deal with in life. My symptoms are mild and equally as beneficial at times as they are performance-degrading. I just “have” them. I don’t “struggle” or “suffer” from them.)

    Again, I wish I could explain to you how Bills’ book put my head in the right space this morning but I can’t. You’re just going to have to wait for it to come out and read it. By the way, the website for it is The Ledger Never Lies.

    The “aha” moment.

    Back to the depression. I didn’t realize it was depression until about 30 minutes ago. I’ve been in this cycle for about 3 weeks now. Money is slow coming in. Some of my larger customers that depend on us have been really slow and we’ve grown comfortable with the repeatable pattern we’ve had with them over the years. They have tons of work that needs to be done. We are unmatched at what we do. We’re the absolute best team out there, bar none. So we’ve stayed busy. Well, between the fact that they’ve been slow as hell paying their bills and the fact that their work is going through a slow phase due to some industry issues with AI, chip manufacturing, and global supply chain problems exacerbated by US politics, well… my work has slowed to a crawl.

    Other larger customers have the same issues, so it’s affecting us on more than one customer.

    I’m sitting at home working at the Compound because “there’s nothing else to do.”

    Meanwhile quote requests start coming in from other customers. I schedule a phone call and learn about the project and then the next thing you know I’m reminding myself day after day that I need to work on that quote. I need to work on that quote.

    But am I working on that quote?

    No. I’m at the Compound installing electrical cabling and conduit boxes and designing airhose supply systems for the new shop.

    Why am I doing that? Well, because it has to get done. Because If I don’t, the shop can’t proceed. Because if…

    WRONG. STOP IT. PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS, TOMMY, AND DO IT RIGHT F*%$ING NOW.

    As Bill so correctly pointed out to me without knowing it, I’m confusing “activity” with “progress.”

    I mean it really irks me…. how freakin often he does this shit to me without even knowing he did it. He’s affected my life (always in positive ways) HUNDREDS of times he’ll never know about.

    In reality, I’m sitting here lulled into the habit of going to the Compound every morning because it allows me to confuse activity and forward progress on one front with REAL work that could be changing my situation and the situation of my team.

    They’re wanting to work and I’m struggling to find it, but I’m “busy” as hell.

    I’m well aware that busy and productive aren’t even related to each other and “busy” often gets mislabeled as productive.

    When I’m in “go mode” I don’t have this problem. But when I start to fall into those mild depressed states of being it’s like I’m mentally drugged. I can’t see what’s right in front of my face.

    I can’t afford to do XYZ because these damned clients’ haven’t paid the 140K in collective invoices they should have paid by now.

    I can’t do this or that because someone didn’t get back to me.

    It’s bullshit.

    This is MY life. This is MY business. This is MY income.

    I built the life I share with my wife on my own. Yes, I need clients, but I don’t need SPECIFIC clients. If a client sucks and is starting to be more pain than they are benefit, there’s a simple solution.

    It’s not sending endless emails to accounts payable reminding them their in stupid amounts of debt and need to pay their damned bill.

    I can just go find new customers.

    I found that one. They’re not the only one out there. Find customers that value and respect the relationship. Don’t just sit and keep taking excuses week after week.

    I’m letting OTHER PEOPLE make decisions about MY success, MY happiness, and MY wealth. Screw that. They don’t have that power. It’s not THEIR choice. It’s MY choice.

    The things I’ve been lulled into by depression and habits and complacency are absolutely ridiculous. I’ll go find customers that DO value the benefit they receive from our team, or that DO have the ability to pay their bills on time. Just because I’ve been doing something for five years doesn’t mean I have to keep doing it when it stops working.

    I’ve been guilty of making bad decisions within my own team as well. There’s a process out there for companies like mine in the structured cabling industry to search through all the large projects going on in a certain geographical area. I’ve “been busy” with other stuff so I passed off the responsibility of looking through those projects to find good jobs to a team member. Nothing ever happened. Not ONE single email ever got sent. Not one single job ever got discussed. I’m paying 5K a year for a service no one is using.

    So I passed it off to another team member the other week. It’s been two weeks. Any progress? Nope.

    I love my team. I respect the hell out of my team for what their skill sets are. But if I’m being honest with myself, they’re not me. If they had the ability to do the job I do, they wouldn’t be working for me.

    It’s just one more passive way of letting myself blame someone else for ME not taking responsibility for my own situation. Well, I left it in their lap. They had nothing else to do. Why isn’t at least something done?

    It doesn’t matter why. It wasn’t. Why did I expect someone else was going to be the one to step forward and help me do my job? Building this company is MY job. If they were as good as it as I was, I’d be working for them instead.

    Vendor customers have excuses for why their project are delayed. So rather than going to the Compound and working on something to distract myself from the depression of not having any work this week, maybe I should drop everything else and go find the work that’s going to pay the bills next month.

    I want to sit down and have a nice evening watching TV with my wife. My brain tricks me by saying well, you’ve worked 25 years to get to this point. You deserve the chance to sit at home and watch TV with Amy for a couple hours each night. The work can wait until business hours tomorrow.

    You know who thinks like that? Employees think like that. People who rely on other people for their income, for their direction think like that. I’m not an employee. I’m not a team member. I’m the founder of this business. I’m the one that is responsible for making sure my wife always has the things she wants and needs in life. I’m the one that’s responsible for being sure my mother can afford to enjoy life in her 70s when social security is a joke and doesn’t even begin to cover the basics to live life happily.

    I’ve been sitting around waiting for everyone else to fix “their” problems, or get off “their” butts, and pretending it’s “their” fault that my bank account is dwindling faster than it’s filling up this past quarter.

    I spent an hour last night playing Xbox with some friends. It’s nice to be able to sit back and joke with friends playing Call of Duty while we’re unaliving the avatars of some 15 year old that’s spending mom and dad’s money and we’re smoking them with just old fashioned skill and tactics. It’s fun to take a break and relax a bit now and then. I’ve served my time in the trenches. I’ve earned this time, right?

    Well, who the hell else is going to get off their ass and do it if it’s not me?

    Rather than sitting on the couch watching NCIS with Amy, or sitting in the shop playing Xbox with Frank, Grizz, and Hayley, maybe I need to be poring over the projects in my area and getting back into my old-school habits of getting things done that actually move the needle.

    Yeah, I DO think I deserve some down time. My wife wants me to have some down time, to spend quality time with her. And I sincerely want to. I also want to ride my motorcycle, work on my shop, build my wife her guest house, mow the grass, 3D print some cool stuff I’ve been wanting to work on… but none of that provides for my wife’s future. None of it puts money in the bank in case my son gets sick, or my Mom’s car breaks, or my daughter calls and need something.

    I got comfortable with the regular cycle of things I had successfully set-up over the last year and a half. I had worked out a pretty nice routine of work flow that allows my company to grow, to profit, and allowed me to have some much-needed free time to try to enjoy the fruits of over twenty years of struggle. I got very comfortable enjoying the extra free time and the freedom that finally came from not having to check the bank account to be sure everything was going to clear ok. I thought I had created something that was self-sustaining in my relationships with both these project companies and with my own team.

    When that cycle broke due to other people’s problems, I let it ride. I told myself it will be short term. It’ll pass in a week or two. After three weeks I said it’ll pass in a month or so. Two and a half months later I open my eyes and realize it’s not passed and I can either sit here and keep doing the same thing, or I can change direction and apply the correct pressure to the areas that CAN improve my life and my mental health and my bank account.

    Maybe try shifting it into Drive

    I’m stomping the gas pedal all day every day of the week, and on the weekends too… but the damned car is in Neutral.

    THAT needs to change.

    So I take a shower. I put on my “gettin ‘er done” clothes, my work boots, brush my hair, pour a fresh cup of coffee, and pull my head out of my ass and get to work.

    There are a dozen packages sitting on my front porch from Amazon. They contain all the new air hoses for the shop’s airline system. I’ve got a new garden bed for my wife to build and install at the Compound.

    I had to ask myself the question: Do either of those tasks directly drive my success? Not in any serious way I can think of.

    Then let them sit there until the damned cardboard rots off the boxes if need be. If it’s not making money, it’s not paying the bills. If it’s not paying the bills, it’s going to add to my stress. If it’s adding to my stress, it’s one more thing that can quietly push me into a mild depression that I don’t see coming until it’s too late.

    You know what would DECREASE my stress? Putting another 100K in the bank.

    So, focus on that instead Tommy.

    Now, if you’ll go excuse me, since my head has been removed from my ass this morning, I’m going to go get some “productive” things done… not busy work, not things I want to do.

    So maybe I can’t watch TV much this coming few weeks. I might miss out on some fun Xbox gaming. My bike might sit there another week collecting pollen instead of making road memories.

    But sorry kids, Daddy’s got work to do.

    If you’re going through the same thing in life – sit back and look hard at what you’re doing to change it. If it’s not working, stop doing it. And seriously, when it comes out, read the damned book “The Ledger Never Lies.”

  • A dream slowly coming together.

    A dream slowly coming together.

    It probably won’t make sense to some people, but this shop has always been a dream of mine. I grew up the son of a master carpenter. My father himself, was also the son of a master carpenter. Wood working and tinkering has always been in my blood. My dad did a lot of things wrong in life, but his woodworking wasn’t one of them. My grandfather was a whole different breed himself. His handshake and a nod of his head was enough to guarantee a project, build a home from start to finish, and the person on the other end of that handshake never had to fear. They were going to get more than they paid for and it was going to be perfect the first time.

    I’m not a master carpenter. Let me lead with that. One day, maybe I’ll have one quarter the skill my father and grandfather did, but not today. I might be better than some, worse than others, and while it’s true I can build just about anything I set my mind to, there’s a different level out there that you one day realize you’re operating at and you’ll know it when its your time. There’s a time when the wood speaks to you, tells you what you can do with it, and bends itself to your will. I have those moment, but they’re fleeting and it’s been a long time since I’ve felt that feeling. I miss it.

    One of the core things I wanted with the new land was a place for “my shop.” While it’s true that for tax purposes, this will definitely be the new operating headquarters of Twisted Networx, my IT company, it will also be the place I one day retire to. In the meantime, it will be the place I experiment with, get back into practice at, and find comfort in.

    I’ve wanted my own shop space for most all my life. I’ve rented a small space from a friend here and there, and I even have a “shop” now across town, but it’s mostly for warehousing the things for my IT business and providing the guys a place to stage their gear and equipment at.

    So when Amy and I walked up the hill on Lot 4 in August of 2024 and I found the spot that was right, I decided that somehow I was going to build my shop and it was going to be right there in that spot. Between the guest house and the main house, the money to spare would be tight, but I would find some way to do it.

    It started with chain saws, a new tractor, and hundreds of hours of clearing endless trees. When you walk into a space in the woods and think to yourself “I’ve got to clear a few trees” that’s one thing, but when you start counting trunks and stepping through briars six feet high and ten feet deep, it becomes a whole different scale of endeavor.

    This picture below was September 1st, 2024. Man, I thought I was tired back then. I had no idea what was in store for me over the next year and a half! In total, we’ve taken out somewhere around 400-500 trees total from the property to make room for the buildings.

    It was burn pile after burn pile, after burn pile. We’ve literally burned hundreds of piles of vegetation, debris, and trees over 2024 and the first part of 2025.

    Even today, a year and a half later, I’ve got piles stacked all over the property that need to be burned.

    2025 was a year of depressing delays. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, unless you can perhaps lay the blame at mother nature’s feet. The area that the shop was going to occupy “looked” like it had a little grade to it. I say that now laughing, but at the time I wanted to cry. My contractor told me there was about 3 ft 8 inches of build-up that was going to be required. That sounds ok until you start thinking that you’ve got to pay for that dirt, and building up something the size of two football fields almost 4 feet up, is NOT a cheap undertaking.

    Thankfully, our main house we’re building has a full basement, or will when it’s complete anyway. Thankfully again, the dirt and stone from that full basement was of sufficient quality that we could use it to build up the pad for the shop.

    Seems easy enough right? Well, you’ve still got to pay for the excavator that digs that stone and breaks it up, the dump truck and skid steer that has to move it, and the dozer that has to compact it.

    To top it all off, you may remember that 2025 was the year of rain. We live out in Stanly County, which is basically the same soil as what you hear commonly called “Georgia red clay.” When it’s wet, you can’t do anything on it. You can’t drive on it, can’t dig it, can’t move it, and can’t get through it. You just have to wait for mother nature to do her thing and give you enough dry days to work.

    In case you think I’m exaggerating, this was July 2nd 2025. That clay is so sticky you can’t even drive equipment over it because the tread will pick up more on one pass than the bucket can even lay down. It was like this almost all year long. It was literally December before we finished getting the soil moved from the main house basement to the shop’s future pad area.

    By midway through 2025 we had a clearing and were starting to move dirt over when Mother Nature allowed.

    This photo below was from September 2025. In case you’re not aware, building up a pad doesn’t just mean you dump 250 dump trucks of soil down and spread it out. Soil and rocks don’t fall flat and fill in the spaces evenly. Proper grading to be sure the floor doesn’t crack and collapse years later means the pad had to be built up in increments of 2-3 inches at a time. The boys would move some soil over, spread it with the skid steer, and then basically drive the bulldozer over it to the point that it broke down to powder and soil rather than rock. That had to be done time after time after time to insure a good foundation.

    By December I was starting to worry because I knew that 2025 had been a year of price increases and I’d already talked to Custom Built Solutions about the deadline for ordering my shop building. The original price was $55,000 when I ordered it in January of 2025, but eventually materials price increases were going to hit me hard if I didn’t go ahead and get this thing ordered. Mickey had already told me they’d had three price increases throughout the year and I’d managed to avoid them, but there was a 10% fee added on due to the rising materials costs. I’d already paid that overage and was NOT looking forward to another one. The same building I’d purchased for $55,000 in January 2025 would cost me $79,000 in February of 2026. We HAD to move forward and move fast!

    Thankfully David called my favorite concrete guys! Ron and Tony did the commercial work for Amy and I when we remodeled Bear Creek so we were already familiar with them and their skills. I’ve got January 26th to make the final “go” order on my building or it’s going to cost 25K more than before. So this is what we were doing in January – pouring concrete. The boys got the waffle-slab done literally JUST in time. The requirement from CBS is that in order for them to begin the manufacturing of the building, I have to send them a picture of the completed slab ready to go, so we HAD to have that slab in place in time for me to make that phone call or I was going to have to start selling feet pics on OnlyFans to pay for the materials increase!

    But wait… it’s gets more fun! The concrete has to dry thoroughly and February decided to bring us the snowpocalypse of 2026!

    With a little luck and a lot of prayer, we got the pad dried in with time to spare and now we just had to wait for the building to be fabricated and brought to site.

    March 30, 2026

    On April 7th, the boys from Custom Built Structures (CBS) showed up and we started the layout. I wasn’t sure what to expect to be honest. I’ve never hired someone ELSE to build MY stuff and I know I can be a stickler for quality work. Little did I know I had absolutely nothing to worry about.

    Luis, Carlos, and Ramiro worked like machines! They were there every day before me, and I arrived at 7 AM every day. They were usually still there after I left each night. My wife is supportive but dinner is going to be served when dinner is going to be served, and if you plan to eat that night, your ass had better be at that supper table. (It’s a rule I love, personally!).

    First day of construction, April 07, 2026.

    By that first evening, things were starting to gel and we were falling into a good rhythm.

    By the 10th of April, the roof was on and sides were going on next.

    At 3:30 this afternoon on Sunday the 12th of April, the work was done! Well, the first step was done anyway. The shell is up and the walls are up and now I can start on my work on the inside. I was so glad to work with this team that I asked for a picture. When the shop is done I’m going to print this out, date it, and hang it on the wall inside my shop for posterity’s sake so I can remember the team that helped make it possible.

    And this is the final product – at least as of this afternoon when they drove off for the last time.

    Final build photo with walls up – April 12, 2026.

    There’s a lot I can’t share about the next steps in photos – both for the building inspector’s sake and because well… OSHA can be an asshole. lol.

    I’ve spent much of the last two days sitting in a chair inside the shop, just looking, thinking, figuring in my head what’s going to be next. Usually at this phase I look at the general contractor and say “What’s next boss?” but this one is mine and David is already building the guest house and the main house so much of this one is going to fall on me to design and pay for.

    It doesn’t help that 2026 has been off to an abysmal start. For those that don’t know, the AI data center explosion of the last year has caused a massive shortage of certain components. The same chips and processors that power these piece of equipment also power many other pieces of technology equipment. The short version is- the AI buying spree has bought up all the component pieces so the smaller vendor like WatchGuard and SonicWall can’t get parts. If they can’t get parts, they can’t produce firewalls and routers. If they can’t produce them, then they aren’t available for me to install. And no firewall means the projects just keep getting pushed back further and further. It’s April of 2026 and rather than doing the normal 16 installs so far this year for about $120K in revenue, we’ve done about…. four… I’ve literally been busy for about 1 week out of four all year long so far.

    That’s put a MASSIVE squeeze on the finances I have available to work on the shop. I’ve also got a team that depends on me for a paycheck and while the very rare “no work this week” is a nice change once or twice a year, it’s not something they want to hear three weeks in a row.

    From the stress-level side of things, I’m about as stressed as I can be. I’ve got to get the money flowing back in the door but I’m at the mercy of everyone else in my industry. I’d LOVE to be doing more structured cabling, but that kind of work tends to be quoted in the spring and installed over the summer, fall, and winter. I’ve probably quoted over a million dollars worth of work so far this year, but in reality I’ll probably get to realize somewhere in the realms of 300K of that, and most of that won’t be until the later part of the year. But if things don’t pick up, it’s going to be a rough 2026 for my team and I.

    Meanwhile my plan is to try to take advantage of the down time and reposition my team to work on the electrical and air-hose work in the new shop.

    In the long term, this is going to just be one faint memory in the line of hurdles towards getting the new shop done, but right this moment it’s a bit of a hurdle that I can’t see my way past. I’ll get there. I’ll get this done and I’ll get this dream realized, but for every gain there’s always an accompanying step back in another area to be dealt with.

    But at the end of the day, I’m a few months away from hopefully having my dream-shop at least operational. It wont’ be “finished” for quite a while, but it’ll be operational in the very near future! I’ll have more updates shortly, but I wanted to post this so you could see the progress.

    Meanwhile, so… who want’s feet pics for $19.95 a month?

  • My wife’s first birthday present

    I started to think this post didn’t belong on the Compound, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed like a memory that’s carried on and will carry on into our future, so I’ll share it here after all.

    Amy and I had been dating a very short time when her birthday rolled around back in 2009; only about six months. Being in a new relationship with what had always been the woman of my dreams was both exhilarating and a little terrifying. I’ve always wanted to be that person that gave a gift to someone because I’d thought it through and it would mean something to them. I’m not much for buying a present for the sake of buying a present.

    I don’t remember if I asked her what she wanted, or she just volunteered it, but keep in mind that we’re both busting our humps every day, both making about 35K a year if we’re lucky, and I’m still cohabitating between Greenville NC and Albemarle. Somehow it came about that she told me what she wanted.

    ” I want a Kitchen-Aid.”

    Immediately I felt a trap about to spring closed. I’ve dated a few amazing women in my life by this time and I’ve learned a few rules about dating and more specifically, about presents.

    Rule #1: Absolutely NEVER buy your wife or girlfriend appliances, things to clean the house with, or things for the kitchen for their birthday or Christmas. NEVER. If you want any chance at this relationship going any further, the last thing you want to do is go “Here honey, now you can vacuum the floors better” or “Here you go, now you’ve got something to help you in the kitchen!”

    No. Just freakin’ NO. Don’t do it. No way. IT’S A TRAP!!!

    I remembered thinking all those things and trying to suss out for sure if she was kidding. Remember we’re both just about as poor as we can be so I didn’t KNOW that she knew what she was asking. I had grown up with a family that had kitchen applicances like that and I was aware what a Kitchen-Aid was, but I was thinking it was like $40.

    Umm, no. Today a good Kitchen Aid artisan model runs between $300 and $500. I went online and started looking, expecting $50, maybe $100. TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY BUCKS?

    Ok, so now I don’t feel like it’s a bad gift… I just needed to figure out which kidney to sell to get it.

    Somehow or another I came up with the money and I brought it down to Manns Harbor for Mom and Amy’s birthday. This had been a tradition with Mom since about 2001, but this would be Amy’s first year dating me to be part of it.

    So yeah, with absolute fear of being laughed out of my own yard, I put the box on the table and cringed while she opened it.

    Can we just appreciate for a moment on the fact that I was able to go back into my photo albums and find Amy’s birthday present from 16 years ago? My OCD photo organizational skills are paying off in my old age!

    Well, obviously it’s been 16.5 years and she’s still with me so it worked out OK, but I’ll never forget the thought of her FIRST present from me being a kitchen implement.

    For comparison, her first present to me was a Dog. I mean I still feel like she got the short end of the stick on this one.

    Sixteen years later…

    This mixer has been a staple in our house since we’ve started dating. Over the years I’ve bought her pasta makers attachments, meat grinder attachments, bowls, implements, and she’s bought her own fair share of things for it too. It’s made hundreds if not thousands of meals, desserts, and been a work horse through probably a fifty or more gatherings of 40+ people at our house.

    While I was photo searching (some things are SO much better with AI), I found her present from Christmas 2015 – MORE Kitchen-Aid accessories!

    Back to the story

    Last month she mentioned to me she thought she might need a new one. This one was making a metal grinding noise. Being a sentimental fool like I am, I decided to embark on the quest to rebuild and regrease the Kitchen-Aid and make it hum like new.

    Let me digress a moment: If you’re like me, you had no idea that you were supposed to re-grease these every couple years. I’d never heard of anyone doing that, but then again most people today just use one every now and then. This one gets more use in a year that some others do in a lifetime. But yeah, you ARE supposed to do this from time to time.

    Anyway, she’s off on a Carnival cruise for a while with her best friend, Krissi, and I’m sitting here in our annual snowpocalypse unable to go to the Compound and work due to the rain and nasty weather, so I decided to get started on it.

    Tearing it down.

    Before Tommy starts breaking things…
    Grease that leaked out over the years behind the beauty band.
    The worm, planetary, and pinion gears.

    Now believe it or not, that’s “dirty” but not nasty. Remember, none of these parts come into contact with your food. This is just integral gearing. Kitchen-Aid switched from a dark food-safe grease to a white grease in 2016 and this model is from 2009. But the fact that you can see the dried grease along the seams means it’s had some leakage around the seals over the years.

    I didn’t buy a new seal kit for it, but in hindsight I might should have. But… next time. We’ll see how she likes it after it’s completed and I’ll rebuild with new seals if she wants me to.

    Three hours, one coffee, one coke, three cans of Brake Cleaner, two rolls of paper towels, half a bottle of Dawn, and one ruined T-shirt later, it’s back in action!

    I tore it down to the bones and degreased everything. This is the worm gear assembly.

    If you’re like me and have never seen the inside of a kitchen-aid, well, here you go. It was a fun tear-down and learning experience.

    The planetary and drive gears are cleaned, stripped down, and ready for regreasing.

    You have to repack it with white food-safe grease.

    Amazingly enough, I had NO spare screws left over when I was done! (and I found all the gaskets and washers, though there was a harrowing 15 minute part there where I thought I’d lost them and went dumpster diving through 300 greasy paper towels in the trash can only to discover they were right where they were supposed to be all along.)

    The photo finish

    Hopefully she’ll be happy with it and decide to make me some more cinnamon rolls as payment!

    I’d like to give a special thanks to the Mr. Mixer Youtube Channel. This young fella knows these machines inside and out and if you’ve got one yourself, he’s probably got a walk-through to get you through the project from end to end.

    And while I probably have more sentimental attachment to this mixer than Amy does, I do sincerely hope it’ll be something that lasts another 16 years. I’ll tear it down and rebuild it every other year if needed. It still makes me smile to this day that the first thing she asked for as a gift was a kitchen appliance!

    I always knew I married a special kind of woman. Earlier this year she asked for a new vacuum cleaner…. yep…. still continuing to defy the norms…

  • Making it real

    Making it real

    Today is January 7th, 2026. I pulled up onto the Compound today as I’ve done literally hundreds of times over the past year, but today it hit different. Today I felt… close. I felt close to my Dad, to my grandfather, to the generations of builders that came before me in my family. Today when I pulled up to what we call Lot 4 or just “the shop” there was actual work going on.

    I got out of the truck with Tango and it reminded me of opening the door for Tara the golden lab we had when I was a kid. I’d pull up on Dad’s job sites to work with him and it would just be me and the dog there some days. I almost looked around for him today. I’d like to think he’d be proud of what we’re doing here. It’s scary as hell. The cost and risk all this carries with it absolutely terrifies me some days into complete inaction, but today wasn’t one of those days.

    Pouring the footings

    When I got to the site, Ron and Tony and their crew were digging out the footers for the shop. The plumber was there with his wife, Libby, setting the drain lines for the bathroom and prepping the RV dump station I plan to tie into my septic system.

    After literally almost 12 months to the week, we’re finally done with earth moving, compacting, more moving, more grading, and the actual process of construction on the shop began in earnest.

    This is also the first post I’ve made on the new website, so if you’re reading this, congratulations and welcome to “The Jordan Compound.” Amy has been writing articles these past few days and you’ll see some of them soon, but this is my little nook here on the website where I can share with you readers out there.

    Pulling up on that site today and being the customer is a weird feeling. I was literally on job sites as a child from the moment I was old enough to swing a hammer. Dad and Papa had me out with them on jobs from about 8 years old. I’ve worked in various aspects of construction my entire career even though my core business is more technology related. Even with IT I’ve always found it comfortable to be wiring new buildings, renovating older structures, doing remodels and such. So many things come natural to me that I watch others struggle with, and I owe most of that to Dad and Papa.

    When my guys struggle with laying out cabling in an existing commercial building, it doesn’t make sense to me because in my own head I’m looking at the foundation corner of the room, subtracting 1.5 inches, then eyeballing inwards in sixteen inch increments. I know that a floor tile is 12 inches so 1.25 tiles passes on the middle of the stud so 1.75 tiles inwards is an acceptable location for a penetration into a wall. If the floor is carpeted, I look to the ceiling instead and count ceiling tiles. All modern tiles are created on 2 ft by 2 ft increments, so two tiles equals three wall studs equals four feet. If it’s a hardtop I look for the telltale marks of drywall seams instead. Calculating footage and stud placement comes as natural to me as breathing. When calculating distance in an open beam ceiling I know that purlins are on 5 ft centers, so I can quickly look up and see three beams and know that the room is 20 ft wide.

    But this project…. this one is totally mine. There’s no option to yell at the general contractor for messing something up. I know because I drew the plans myself that the general contractor is using to create his blueprints and we’ve spent countless days here at the old house over coffee designing, redesigning, editing, and tweaking plans. Even today when we were standing on-site I mentioned that we needed to be sure to remember the electrical conduits in the footers before they were poured. That prompted a conversation where David offered a suggestion that is truly just as efficient, doesn’t require it to be done during the footing pour, and would be cheaper in the long run. Man plans- God Laughs.

    I’m the first to always say that no plan survives contact with the enemy. On a job site the enemy is the building itself. You can plan for absolutely everything you can imagine and the moment things start to get cemented into place is the moment you realize you forgot something or your calculation was off and it’s going to cause a problem.

    But today I didn’t have any of that on my mind. Today I watched Ron and Tony and those guys laying out the footer trenches, placing rebar and standoffs, and beginning the waffle slab cuts that will criss-cross the entire shop floor throughout.

    In case the pic above looks strange to you I’ll explain.

    The boards you see going around the foundation are for the concrete forms to butt up against. The top of the board is the top height of the slab, so it’s currently about 12 inches above grade but we’ll raise the grade up as we get closer and it’ll be about 6 inches above grade when it’s complete most likely. That’s what I pay David for. He knows that kind of info so I don’t have to.

    The concrete team measures out 10 foot lines and paints them on the ground and then Tony takes the excavator and cuts a six inch trench over the lines to create the waffle texture below the slab. Between the cuts, gravel is placed on the raised sections to get ready for concrete to pour over top.

    Once the pouring begins, the concrete will settle into the rebar-reinforced waffle pattern under the entire floor of the shop. The purpose is to add strength. I’ve seen so many shops over the years suffer from cracked floors and that’s the one thing I told David I never wanted to deal with. One day I hope to build custom furniture in here, to have some 3D CNC routers in here, and the one thing you absolutely can NOT have is a cracked and gapped floor with uneven places.

    This style of construction is a little more expensive but it’ll give me a solid foundation in the shop that will last my entire lifetime. What happens to it after I’m dead and gone isn’t my concern. If it lasts the next 40 years I’ll be perfectly happy with the added expense. (I mean I say that now, but I haven’t gotten Ron’s bill yet. Check back with me in a month or two. If you see me selling kidney fluid on the black market, just keep scrolling on by, ok? Don’t judge. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!)

    Just to show you a little of the history, here are a few photos of the evolution of things.

    That photo above is January 25, 2025 – almost a year ago next week. Amy and I had spent a long few months taking down trees on each property to take out JUST the amount required. We individually checked and tagged every tree on this 40 acres that was to come down, just to make sure no one came in and started clearing land that would take a lifetime to bring back if they made a mistake.

    It’s hard to even remember what it felt like back then. I remember my back hurt… I remember that much! Every tree in that clearing that came down was cut into 12 ft sections, and then we stacked the tops and burned them off. God the amount of fires we built when we were starting.

    I was SO terrified of accidentally setting the woods on fire that my first slash piles were four feet high, 8 feet long, and maybe 6 feet wide. After weeks and weeks of burning and getting more comfortable knowing what the humidity would do, how the wind acts in certain areas, and just being exhausted I found myself lighting off slash piles 200 feet long, 10 feet wide and 12 feet tall and just letting it burn! Don’t get me wrong. I still have a huge respect for mother nature and what she can do, but after burning basically the equivalent of 6-8 acres by hand, tree by individual tree, I’m pretty comfortable now knowing my limitations.

    I’ll never forget the memories I’ve had the chance to make with Amy during all this either. Never in our strangest dreams did either of us see her driving a tractor on our “farm” property while I ran a chainsaw. To borrow a phrase from common usage these days – I didn’t have that on my bingo card!

    February 8th 2025 – Amy on the General

    She thinks I’m camera crazy. I’m always snapping photos of her doing things, especially when it’s stuff she’s doing with me.

    It’s not that I’m a shutterbug. It’s that I want to be able to share the memory one day. My kids don’t have an interest in this kind of thing right now. I didn’t either when I was their age. But as an adult all I have is the stories Mom tells me occasionally of how she and Dad built our first house, and how she helped do this or that.

    I want more than the stories to look back on. I want to break out the (digital) photo album when we’re 70 and throw back to the days when Momma-Amy was a badass on the tractor hauling logs out from the shop and the house while I was out there cutting them down and logging them.

    March 12, 2025 – clearing logs at the shop

    This photo above was March. We’d been clearing and cutting and burning for two months at this point and it was still a minefield of downed pines that we couldn’t navigate. The only way through it was to just keep logging, cutting, and burning.

    March 14, 2025. Kemp and Trevor (his son)

    I’ve made some great memories with friends and my team too along the way. Kemp is one of my team at Twisted Networx. They enjoyed coming out to help. I got to teach Trevor how to use timber jack while Kemp took turns with me trading off from the tractor to the chainsaw.

    Not having help can be it’s own blessing sometimes. When you’re working solo you can take all the time you need, but the going is slow. It’s a constant repetition of cutting for about 15 minutes, then going back to tractor to move what you’ve cut so you can move forward to work the next section.

    Having help on the other hand more than doubles the speed at which you can work because no one has to stop working. But… umm.. I’m getting older and swinging that 20 pound chainsaw ain’t as much fun when you’re not stopping every 15 minutes to run the tractor for awhile. So Kemp would trade off with me every hour or so. One of us would cut for a bit and then we’d swap and that one could drive the tractor for an hour or so to give them a break.

    And let’s not forget the simple expense of the tools it takes to do this kind of work. If you’d asked me four years ago if I’d ever own farm equipment I’d have told you it wasn’t very likely, but it didn’t take long for my pragmatic mind to start evaluating options.

    Rental costs of equipment and the cost of paying operators for certain things quickly add up when you’re talking about 40 acres of working farmland. I could either spend the same money and have the work done faster, but have nothing to show for it when it’s done, or I could buy my own equipment, buy my own tools, do the work myself and when the project is completed I’ve collected both the equipment to continue using to maintain the land, to use for other work-related projects, AND I’ve gained hundreds of not thousands of hours operating it all.

    In case you’re curious, it breaks down like this:

    Large Equipment

    A good mid-size tractor. The General is a 25 horse Kubota L2502 with a dual piston grapple, bucket, loader, commercial bush-hog, and a variety of other implements I’ve picked up from friends on loan. That’s about $36,000

    Roscoe, the Honda Pioneer 700, I purchased second hand from an older lady whose husband passed away. It was about $11k, but I ended up putting another 1K into it because I didn’t know they weren’t the FIRST owners of it. Apparently the FIRST owners were some kids that decided it would be fun to mud bog with and I had to learn how to rebuild an entire front differential and change CV joints.

    Chainsaws

    I remember purchasing my first gas powered chainsaw to help with a hurricane effort on the Outer Banks back in… maybe 2015, or 2016. It was purchased from Tractor Supply in Albemarle for $236 and I thought that was a big toy and it cost a lot. I had no idea!

    Thankfully, I was in a much better financial situation when Hurricane Helene hit western NC in late 2024. After crewing and leading a ridiculous number of chainsaw crews during the relief effort I got to see first hand what goes into maintaining a good saw, what kind of saw does what kind of work best, and what kind of saws to stay away from.

    Personally I settled on an Echo Timberwolf for my main heavy saw. She’s 20 inches long and 65cc and cuts hardwood like a hot knife through butter – as long as you keep the chain out of the dirt. That saw is about $700 after you get chains, gas, oil, etc.

    A friend of mine, Ben, donated me a 20 inch Husqvarna 450 rancher that didn’t work at the time. It had all kinds of problems and I never thought it was going to be worth anything, but Ben sat there in the rain on the tailgate of my truck during Hurricane Helene and literally tore that saw down, fixed the variety of things wrong with it, and managed to put it back together and it fired up. I decided to give it a shot and while it’s not quite the badass my Timberwolf if, it’s a great saw!

    Having two big saws is a huge bonus. The Rancher is a little cheaper and so are the chains for it, so it’s what I call my “ground” saw. 

    Fun fact: Most people already know that running your chainsaw through dirt and debris will quickly ruin its sharpness. It literally takes about 1 second or 1 rock to make a chainsaw completely useless until the chain is resharpened. What people might NOT know is this:  Cutting trees near the ground, even if it looks clean, isn't clean at all. Pine trees expecially are known for their bark absorbing the dirt and clay that accumulates near the base of the tree. It makes total sense when you think about it. If it's constantly surrounded by dirt and rocks, it only makes sense that some of them get picked up inside the base of the tree. So when you're cutting at ground level, you're cutting through trace amounts of dirt and soil the entire time.

    So the Rancher is the ground saw. This is the one that cuts the trees at the base so my Timberwolf stays super sharp. Once the tree is down on the ground, I’ll cut it up with the Timberwolf. So that’s two saws you have to carry around with you.

    Penelope – the limbing saw.

    So we’ve cut the trees down and cut up the big stuff, but what about all those limbs and small branches that need to be trimmed?

    Limbing out a tree with a 20+ pound saw after you’ve already been logging for 4-6 hours is a defeating task. Your arms are already beyond the point of being worn out and the act of swinging that big saw on that much small stuff is just painful to even think about.

    This is where Penelope comes in! Yes, we named the Echo CS-2511T Penelope because it’s small and cute.

    But dont for one second let that fool you. This saw is by far my favorite saw of all of them. It took the guy at Stanly Tractor quite a few minutes to convince me that I was going to spend more on that saw than I did on the BIG saw. This little saw is almost $700 by the time you get it kitted out and ready to rock and roll.

    I originally bought it for Amy to do limbing with. She actually gave me a hard time, telling me “Don’t you dare go buy me a girly saw.”

    It took her a bit to understand that there’s nothing girly about this saw. It literally cuts limbs, branches, and small trees as fast you can wield it. Cutting something like a 1 inch sapling is like swinging a machete at it. By the time the chain touches the wood, it’s through and never even slowed down. Taking down 4 inch trees takes about 3 seconds. This thing is awesome.

    I’ve somehow gone down a rabbit hole of tools… let me digress back to my point.

    I forgot my point… I think the first picture of the chainsaw sent my ADHD into overdrive….

    Oh yeah, working on the land!

    Let’s not forget all the time consuming (and kinda expensive) stuff that goes along with trying to clear all this yourself safely and without burning the woods down.

    March 30 – refilling the IBCs for fire-fighting and water needs.

    We’ve got 40 acres to work, maybe 10 acres total to clear out, and we’ve got no power, no running water, and no access to either resource.

    That got me on the hunt for some IBC containers. That’s the name of those things you see above. They are 275 gallon containers that hold a variety of liquids. These here came from a friend. The school purchased them during Covid and they were full of hand sanitizer. I got them for the low low price of free.99.

    After taking them home and cleaning them out with soap and water, they were ready to use for fire-fighting or for watering plants until the buildings got built. I didn’t need them for that right away, but Amy’s desire for planting things was always going to outpace my contractor’s ability to work quickly. That was never in doubt!

    The next challenge? How do you move 275 gallons of water easily?

    The answer is you don’t. Water weighs 8 pounds per gallon, so a full container is 2,200 pounds, or just over 1 ton. The container weighs 135 pounds empty, so now you’re at 2,335 pounds.

    No small farm tractor has that kind of lift capacity in the bucket. (Yeah, add that to the list of things I wish I’d known when I was pricing tractors, right?) But to be fair NONE of the smaller tractors can pick up that much weight on the front. You’d need a BIG boss to get that kind of lift on the front end.

    So I had to come up with a way to ferry water. One of the IBCs sat at the property in proximity to the current areas we were burning. The other would ride on the trailer back to the house, get filled with the garden hose, and then I’d bring it back out to the property and pray I could park close enough to rig up a water transfer system.

    Well, neither physics nor gravity wanted to cooperate with me. In order to have any real pressure at all, the IBC needs to be fairly full and in order for water to flow, it needs to flow down hill. Water won’t move uphill on it’s own without serious pressure.

    Thankfully my buddy Tim Pendergrass is a bigger geek than I am!

    The box you see above is a custom box Tim built for himself and then after deciding he needed a bigger one, he gave me this one. It had been sitting in my shop for months with no real purpose to serve yet…..

    It’s basically a box of 18650 batteries he reconditioned, added a charge controller and some outlets and connectors to, and the rigged to a solar panel input for recharging.

    So this little box ran my Harbor Freight RV pump enough for me to transfer the IBCs back and forth. It’s not quick mind you…. it takes over an hour for this little pump to move that much water, but in the end it worked and that’s what matters.

    Everything about this…. project? I’m not sure project is even the right word. Everything about this undertaking has been a challenge. That’s not a complaint. I truly enjoy challenges. They teach me how to overcome obstacles I’ve not faced before.

    Building this shop, this house, and working this land has taught me a lot of things about myself, and about my Dad and grandfather.

    I finally realized that I looked at them the same way people that don’t know me but see what I do look at me. I often hear “I don’t how how you learn all this stuff.” It finally clicked that when I was a kid and thought my Dad knew literally EVERYTHING… that he didn’t. He was figuring it out as he went just like I’ve been doing. This was just one of those experiences that gave me so many back-to-back challenges that I had to overcome that I just quit worrying about challenges in general. They’re just challenges, and I’ll just figure it out as I need to.

    It’s really translated to a lot more peace in my work-life too. My team still gets flustered, pissed off, aggravated at job sites when things don’t go right. I used to be the same way. The last solid YEAR of non-stop challenges has taught me that I’ll figure it out. That’s what humans do. None of us have all the answers. We LOOK like we have all the answers to someone on the outside I suppose, but really we don’t. We just take one challenge at a time, solve it, and move on.

    Have all my solutions been perfect? Oh absolutely not. You guys don’t see the failures. You only see me post the successes.

    There are days I go to the compound and I’m there for 5-6 hours. During that time I might only “work” for one and a half hours, but that’s because I spent the other four trying to figure out how I was going to overcome some obstacle, or I was sitting and thinking about how to do the most work and achieve the most progress, with the limited resources (just myself). What can I do TODAY that’s going to help me tomorrow? Or what does the contractor, the grader, my wife, the county permitting office, or someone else need that’s on a timetable that has to be done by a certain date to avoid holding up some other step.

    Bringing it all back around.

    I say all that to say that when I got out of my truck today and set foot on what was finally a “real job site” I was ready for it. Do I know how it’s all going to come together? Not yet. Do I know where the well is going to be, what guage wire I need for the 400 amp service to the building, how I’m going to get power to the gun range, or any of the other hundred questions I’m going to have to figure out in the coming months? Nope.

    But neither did Dad and he was TRULY a MASTER craftsman. I’ve got his same confidence. Anyone that knows me can vouch that I’ve never suffered from a shortage in that department. But it’s not confidence in my SKILL that makes me at peace these days. Instead its confidence bred from hundreds or thousands of small challenges that have all been overcome that lets me know I’ll come up with the answer when I need to. I don’t know it now, but I’m confident I can figure it out when needed. THAT is the lesson that building this farm, this compound has taught me.

    In the last year and a half we’ve taken on building a new home, building a new shop, setting up the guest house property as a business that can rent/VRBO for additional income, started keeping bees, planned for fruit trees and sales of wildflowers to local nurseries.

    In case you’re curious, I don’t know how to do ANY of that… yet.

    But I married the strongest, most capable woman I’ve ever known and she just simply will not let me fail. She comforts me when I need it, but more importantly she just exists in this space in my mind and in my heart that means I simply can not allow her dreams to not come true. Failing her isn’t an option. Sure, I want some “me” things (like my shop) but for the most part she’s the reason for all of this – and with THAT as the reason, failure isn’t an option.

    And maybe I just needed to say that out loud (as it were)…. You, the reader, don’t get it I’m sure, but I’ve been struggling with a lot of fear lately about this whole endeavor. The magnitude and the sheer cost alone are staggering to a guy that grew up in a single-wide trailer. But I just realized… this is almost completely for HER… so it can’t possibly fail. She’s never failed at anything in her life and I’m certainly NOT going to allow myself to fail to deliver her dreams when they’re finally on the horizon.

    And in case I ever doubt that… I’ll leave myself with this picture as a reminder…

    She has a tractor, knows how to dig a hole, and knows how to dispose of a body…

  • The start of a new journey

    I don’t have a particular reason for wanting to memorialize this last couple days except that I guess it stands out in my mind enough to be a milestone I’d like to remember through the years.

    The month of June is always a busy one in our lives. My wife and I always take a trip in July for her birthday and preparation and planning is always a big part of the June calendar.  There’s mother’s day in there somewhere, Father’s day in there too. We also have a wedding anniversary on the 19th, and my birthday lands on the 24th without fail every year… those dates will matter more as you read on.

    This year was the first year on our anniversary that we didn’t buy each other anything. We both talked about it at length. We spent so very many years scraping by paycheck-to-paycheck and saving pennies (literally, there’s a jar in my kitchen still). Back in those years a dinner out somewhere nice (and by nice I mean Applebee’s) was a treat. We’d take each other out to dinner on our birthdays, or mother’s day, or anniversary. We would be sure to have SOME kind of gift for each other just to be sure the other knew they were thought of.

    So, maybe you can imagine how hard it was for me to get all the way to my 14th anniversary of being married to this amazing woman and literally have nothing for her to offer. 

    We both have everything we need. We really do. For the most part we have the things we want as well. Money is better in recent years and if we see something we like, we usually just pick it up if it’s within reason. That makes the “what do you want for ______ holiday” question a difficult one because if it was affordable and our spouse wanted it, they probably already got it for themselves sometime earlier.

    The hunt for home…

    Some of you know we’ve been searching for land for a home for quite a few years now. We searched on our own for a year or two with no luck. Then we enlisted the help of a realtor friend to help hunt in earnest. I remember thinking that it’s only a matter of weeks now, maybe a month or two, until we have that perfect piece of land to build a house on.  And if you’re ever in need of one,  I’ve got a great one. Can you imagine talking and sending info and visiting land together again and again for THREE YEARS without anything being suitable?

    That was three years ago….

    The real-estate market has been a mess in recent years. People want 350K for a piece of land that you can’t even put a house on. I remember 13 acres out near the county line that looked beautiful until you went there and realized it has two valleys, a few hard scrabble trees, a creek running through it, and nothing but solid granite everywhere. There wasn’t a place to build a dog house, much less a homestead on. That was our luck time and time again for three long years.

    Right after memorial day a place came up on MLS and I took a look at it. I’ve been so disheartened that I honestly didn’t think that much of it. I looked at it myself, and thought to myself that I needed to remind Amy to look at it later. 

    Another week went by and I remembered to show it to her. We looked at it together on the computer, went over the plat, the property maps and all the other data available. Finally I called the realtor and told her I was gonna drive out there and have a look at it myself.

    After taking a trip out to see it and walking the land myself I started to get my hopes up a little. Maybe this could be it. It’s got promise. It’s large enough. If I changed the “perfect plan” in my head and allowed a little flexibility in my plan for the perfect land to build our dream home on, then maybe this could be it.

    I went out twice more to walk it, just stand under the trees and feel what it would be like if this was my back yard, the place my dogs could run and play, the place I’d clear to build a home. 

    Finally we made a phone call to the realtor, went back and forth, made offers, counter-offers, and settled on a price that made both sides feel good about the deal and just like that it was done.. we’d made an official offer on a piece of land.

    Coincidentally, that happened on the afternoon of June 19th.

    A few weeks before, while sitting in my recliner, I was searching for the appropriate gift for the 14th anniversary. After discovering what the traditional gift was I was even more convinced I couldn’t get my wife anything relevant that was sweet, loving, and memorialized the amazing 14 years together we’ve shared.

    It wasn’t until two days later that it hit me.

    The 14th anniversary traditional anniversary gift is wood. The ideal gift would be something made from wood that symbolizes love.

    Neither of us realized it that day…. but we’d just put an offer on 31 acres of nothing but pure wooded forest.

    In hindsight, nothing I could ever have made would be as good, and nothing she could buy me from a store would have been as relevant or important to me. 

    After being married to this amazing woman for fourteen years, right down to the very day, we finally found a place that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, agreed on it together, and made the decision together to go for it.

    Sometimes God just reaches down and pats you on the back and says “here you go, son.”

    The next step

    If you’ve never built a home from scratch, you might not be familiar with the hundreds of decisions that go into it or the amount of those decisions that might not be in your control. Where does your well go? Where does your septic field go? What soil is suitable for the house foundation? Is there too much granite to put it where you want? 

    Many of these decisions are out of your control. God and the earth decided them for you hundreds or thousands of years ago whether you knew it or not. It could be the perfect spot but if it won’t perc, you can’t use it. If it’s uphill from the house, you can’t use it without a pump system (which is another point of failure in the future). If you can’t hit water nearby, you can’t build the house there. So many of these things are beyond our ability to control.

    I’ve spent most of a week off and on walking this land searching for perc locations, searching for underground water and wondering where I could put a well. The amount of time I’ve stood in the woods mentally saying things like “Well, if the house sits here, and I can find water there… no, wait… that wont’ work… Ok, if the house is there, and the barn is over there then… crap, that won’t work either.” 

    So I started off with a call to “My contractor.” I say that kind of jokingly because it’s not like we build enough stuff to have a “contractor” of our own on retainer.

    Let me tell you the back story and it’ll make more sense.

    Backstory

    In 2017 my wife and I had decided to remodel Bear Creek Veterinary Hospital, the practice she literally built from the ground up. And when I say from the ground up, I literally mean it. She designed the building, picked the land, and had it built to her specifications. I can only imagine the frustration that construction crew had over the time it took to erect that clinic.

    When it came time to remodel it, we needed a contractor. No one in the area I knew had the skill to pull off what my wife wanted so I went abroad to find someone. A referral from my uncle Reese sent me to David Proffit. 

    I’ll never forget our first conversation. I called David and tried my best to impress him with the vision of what I wanted before he could hang up and tell me “no.” Thankfully either he’s very patient, or I’m just lucky, or I did a decent enough job, but when I was done painting my picture for him and let him get a word in he kind of sat there silent for a moment and finally said “Mr. Jordan, that sounds like quite a project you’ve got there…. umm… you DO know I’m a high-end residential contractor, right? I don’t do commercial construction. I’m not even licensed down there to do what you want me to do.”

    I said something like “Sir, that’s exactly why I called you. Your reputation precedes you and you… well, you haven’t met my wife.” I went on to explain that the look and feel she wanted was that of a beautiful place to serve the community and that a commercial contractor was the last thing I wanted.

    Long story short, over the next year and a half, David Proffit and I became great friends. He took my wife’s vision of what she wanted and created a masterpiece that today is the newly remodeled Bear Creek Veterinary Hospital.

    If you’ve ever set foot in it you would know what I mean. Its the largest, most gorgeous, well built, functional, and simply amazing veterinary clinic you’ve ever set foot in.

    The credit goes to my wife for designing it and to David for making her vision and her dream a reality.

    And we’re back to the story.

    That was in 2018. For the last six years we’ve remained friends with David, kept abreast of his projects, and he’s stayed interested in our lives. My wife told him after he finished Bear Creek that one day he was going to build our next home for us. 

    Even back then he was quick to let us know that while that idea certainly appealed to him, he had been building homes for a long time and was starting to look forward to retirement.

    Whenever we’d talk over the last couple years he’d tell of what he was doing and we’d tell of our fruitless search for land to build a home on.

    Earlier this year he told me he’d officially retired. The house he was working on was going to be the last one and he wasn’t even sure how he was going to get through this one. I grew up in the construction industry so I remember my dad and grandfather dealing with the same things.

    So when I called him last week to talk about the new property we’d found he quickly reminded me that he was retired. That’s fine, I told him. I just respect your skill and your knowledge and I want to pay you as a consultant to help us find the right contractor and help us bring our dream to reality.

    I asked if he was going to be down this way because I know from experience that he’s got talent for “witching” for water. Luckily he was going to be in the area and agreed to come check out the land and give me his opinion. He agreed and we went out yesterday to visit the land.

    We walked for about an hour checking perc locations talking about grading and elevations, hypothesizing about homestead locations, drive ways, privacy and all the other things.

    I’d found two locations on the property I liked for home location. After breaking out his dowsing rods, we spent about 5 minutes and located an underground stream about 20 feet from where I most likely wanted to place the foundation. Perfect!

    As we’re walking back down towards the truck we noticed another vehicle. We introduced ourselves and discovered this was the current owner. My realtor had been relentless in keeping all communication between the realtors so as to be sure things went smoothly so I hadn’t met the seller yet.

    As we chatted and introduced ourselves, I discovered that he was also a recently retired general contractor for high-end homes. David and Barry chatted a bit and David admitted that one of the reasons he’d retired and wasn’t necessarily keen on taking on a home down here was because it was so far out of his area that he didn’t have any good subcontractor.

    Guess what Barry had? As a recently retired general contractor himself he has a full rolodex of his own crews he’s been using all his life. He laughed and said “What do you need? Masonry, Drywall, Plumbing, Framing, Painters…. I can give you my guys for all of it.”

    Well, dang… I didn’t know it yet,  but David’s hurdles were starting to disappear in front of him.

    I had explained earlier to Barry that Davis was retired but I was using him as a consultant and friend. Before we left Barry kind of smiled and asked David, “So, are you going to be the contractor on this one or not?” 

    I remember being surprised when instead of just saying “no” he kind of waved his hand in that wishy-washy way we do when we’re unsure and said “Weeeeellllll….I guess that’s not really been decided.”

    WHAT? (ok, don’t say anything. Don’t mess with the juju. Just hush and carry on. Don’t get your hopes up…. )this is what I’m telling myself as we drive back to our house.

    Quite randomly my wife messages me and says “Would you like to go out to dinner for your birthday?”

    I told her we had David with us but he had no plans and asked if it would be ok if he were to join us. She agreed and for the next hour and a half we sat at dinner and talked about ideas for the new home; plan ideas, detached power meter, barn location, well, basement concepts, everything.

    Two hours later we’ve had dinner and we’ve talked about everything you’d imagine someone talks about when imagining building their first (and hopefully last) home together and we’re back at the house.

    While sitting around the dining room table, Amy finally just looks across the table and asks David in her sweetest-I-know-what-you’re-gonna-say voice… “David, are you gonna be our contractor?”

    As I start to think “oh, man, talk about putting him on the spot” he kind of half grins, half bows his head in defeat and says “Yeeaaahhh, I am.” I mean it was kind of drawn out of him long and slow…. yeeeaaahhhhh…. I am.

    She literally jumped out of her chair and I start banging the table and she high-fives me across the dinner table… we have our contractor!

    And THAT was my birthday present!

    So on our anniversary we made the offer on the land, and on my birthday a week later we have our builder and it’s the one we’ve been saying we wanted for the last six years.

    Looking to the future…

    Looking forward, I don’t know what to expect. I don’t know what it’s going to hold for us. I DO know that I want to remember and hold on to the feeling I have right now – the feeling that we’ve had a dream for so very long and in a matter of days it started to come together.

    I want to hold on to the feeling of walking through those woods and looking at the land and imagining what this can be when we get to the end of the journey – or really to the beginning of the next journey.

    I spend some days feeling… average. I’m an average Joe – to borrow a phase from my wife – “workin in the dirt” and I don’t have the time to stop and appreciate how truly blessed I am.

    Then I have moments like this in life – truly the moments you can go your entire life and only experience a couple of times – where I look at the amazing wife I have, at the life we have together, at where we came from and where we’re looking ahead to – and it will almost bring me to my knees. 

    I remember, as does my wife, when we had $35 and it had to stretch to buy a week’s groceries. That was what we refer to as the “Aldi years” in our marriage. I remember her working 70 hours a week, me working 70 hours a week, and barely being able to make ends meet. I remember Aldi brand peanut butter is NOT Skippy and Aldi brand Fruit Loops are an abomination that should be considered crimes against humanity! I don’t ever want to forget those years – but I also don’t want to live in fear of going back to them.

    Circumstances could change tomorrow. I absolutely know that. But you also can’t live in fear. We’re both 47 year old now.  I think it was John F Kennedy that said “those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.” 

    I don’t want us to look back thirty years from now and wonder what could have been if we’d only taken the leap. I’d rather take that chance, take that leap, and give it everything I’ve got in me to give my wife the the life and the peace and security and tranquility she deserves in a home she loves on land that she calls her own, surrounded by nature, tall trees, and the deer in the back yard. 

    So far in the few times I’ve been out there I’ve found deer, coyotes, black snakes, hawks, turkeys, and no shortage of ticks and red bugs too!

    It’s going to be hard. There are going to be days I want to give up. We’re going to fight about things – floor plans, money, and the innumerable headaches that come with building a home – especially when we’re both strong-willed and hard-headed people…. but if absolutely anyone on this earth can do it, I think it’s us. Ok, it’s mainly her…. but I’m stronger because she’s my inspiration.

    If you do nothing else in life, as a man or a woman, do this one thing – find someone that makes you realize you’ll do absolutely anything to make them happy. I don’t mean that in some cute emotional kind of way. When you’ve found it, you know it and it’s like nothing else. It’s not a cute, soft feeling of joy or love. It’s not giggles and smiles over pancakes at breakfast.  It’s deeper than that. It’s something that galvanizes in your bones and adds to who you are. It doesn’t take away. It builds itself in you. It’s something only they bring out in you, only they can make come to the surface, and ONLY they know they should never fear. But everyone else, every single person you ever encounter, should truly fear coming between your inspiration and their happiness because they know you’ll burn the world to ashes for them if need be.

    Find that person that makes you realize that you have it in you to conquer absolutely anything and destroy any hurdle that stands between them and the happiness you know they deserve. 

    I’ve found that for me. I’ve found the only person on God’s green earth with the grit, determination, patience, sarcasm, and love enough to put up with me. Find that person and ANYTHING is possible.

    This didn’t start out as me writing about my wife, but in reality it’s always about her. The house, the home, the land, the success. None of it means anything without her. Find that person. They’re out there and whether you know it or not, they’re searching for you too, even if they don’t know it.

    In conclusion

    The journey has begun now in earnest. I’ve been away from writing for a long time but I hope over the next little while I’ll have the inspiration to share more stories again. Some of them will be “Hey, look at this great idea I had!” Others will be good for the next book I write titled “Things to never do when building a home.”

    Either way, it’ll be a journey worth living because of who I get to live it with!

The Compound

Home-based business selling local honey, homemade breads, and artisanal products. Focused on fresh, locally sourced ingredients and sharing our story and dreams with the community.