How It All Began

It all started 5 years ago when I told Bill that I was ready to downsize our house and yard. We had a house that was 5300 square feet and our yard was 2 1/3 acres and there was just the two of us left. That house had 13 sinks in it; way too many for anyone to have to keep clean.. It was a house well loved. We built it 20 years ago by ourselves and raised our two beautiful girls in it.

This is where the name Smithbuilt comes from. We literally built the house with our eight hands with a little help from the professionals. For our first Christmas in the house I gave Bill a architectural rendering of the house I tinted our colors and named  the drawing "The House That Smithbuilt". The deck became "The Deck that Smithbuilt", the pond was "The Pond that Smithbuilt". All but one of our companies start with Smithbuilt followed by a description of the type of company it is. That is our mantra and thought it appropriate that this blog about our new adventure be titled Smithbuilt.

It took me two years of talking to get Bill convinced to sell our home and two and a half years for it to sell. It was a very unusual home and took some special people to love it as much as we did. It sold and we had 5 weeks to find a place to live. Not wanting to rush any decisions in finding a p lace we will live in until it's time for a nursing home we moved into one of our Smithbuilt rent houses. It was a really cute two bedroom one bath with only three sinks in the house. We wiggled into our space and went on the hunt for something more permanent.

 We didn't know if we wanted to build or buy an existing house. I said I wanted a one bedroom apartment with dining room seating for 37. We are so fortunate to have a big family and I love having them over for family dinners.We needed enough space to store all of the stuff we have for our rent houses. When family and friends renovate they give us all of the old stuff to use in our rent houses so it's not unusual for us to have one or two toilets, several sinks, a couple of doors plus all the tools that are needed for property management. Somehow we thought that might be a little difficult to find and might have to be custom built.