Couple moves to Colorado and builds dream home by hand!

hey there folks this is josh stoney ridge farmer we are far from the stoney ridge farm so today we are in blackhawk colorado with brian and amy and you guys might remember brian and amy from two years ago there'll be a link to that video and these guys just had gotten started building their dream home here up in blackhawk colorado and alpine country so today we're going to have a little bit of fun this is amy hey this is brian how's it going and i knew brian from work as a nurse brian's a pa is that right yeah and still a pa still drives down the mountain every day every day and amy amy's nutrition tell me uh dietitian dietitian so amy's a dietitian you kind of work from home now a whole lot i do yeah a lot of clients at home yep yep and you guys are far away enough from town that working from home is probably pretty nice huh yeah yeah so guys there's a huge movement back to the land and today we're going to take you guys to a place where brian and amy have hand built their house up here in the alpine country of blackhawk colorado all right [Music] so we're going to let brian and amy kind of walk us through here and brian's got a cool project so stick around to the end we're going to take you down to the retaining wall project that he's got going on it's just fun stuff to take you guys along and show you what other people are doing this is kind of a it's not a farm video at all this is kind of a diy video although amy and brian tried their hand at alpine gardening tell me about that real quick well let's see there's certain things that we have a really really slow and short growing season so the temperatures up here stay pretty cool year round even in the summertime temperatures get you know below 50 degrees and so that really limits your heating degree days which really limits what you can grow so so far with just having a garden out there we've been able to grow strawberries we can do simple things like zucchinis but nothing that you really love like that takes hot weather like tomatoes and peppers there's no chance of it but you're planning on a geodome a greenhouse geodome yeah we've been looking at though so we're thinking that might be really fun for us because we could also have a place to hang out in the winter time like another escape nice that also is a place to grow food cool now in case you guys don't know brian and amy do have a youtube channel and i'm going to post a link right up here scrolling it's colorado mountain living there'll also be a link at the end of this video so you can check those guys out and follow them these folks are great people good friends just good honest wholesome people and i think it's good to learn from different people like this uh brian is the handicraft master when it comes to building stuff with wood and amy does awesome stuff with uh you make jewelry and all kinds of stuff like that so yeah yeah and a big honey bee hobbies big honey bee yeah figuring out how to do bees up at high altitude it's a whole nother project too yep you got what'd you say three quarts of honey last year yeah just about three quarts three hives three quarts good stuff well let's talk about the siding a little bit i'm gonna put the camera on you guys and let you just talk about all the work that went into this because every bit of the siding up here they did all by hand and it's all douglas fir right right and you guys painted all this and sealed it and i mean it looks great so let's put the camera on these guys and let them talk us through the house guys welcome to colorado mountain living so let us tell you a little bit about our house so so far our one of our big projects was the siding behind us you can see the red colored um douglas fir we used actually i think it was dark walnut dark walnut was the stage stain that we used on it amy did all the staining at before i put it up uh a little bit afterwards but so every board she painted the back to protect it and then the front she stained it and then uh as there she was finishing up i would start putting them on the house yeah so we had quite the system going we had about uh eight different saw horses all of our boards lined out and luckily it didn't rain too much last summer yep it was good it was good so we did a quarter inch riser off the back right on top of the tyvek and then that gave a little quarter inch space in case any moisture got in there so it wouldn't rot the wood so then we just built it right up as we got as we went and i stapled the spacers on and uh this is our last year's project last summer it and it took the whole summer so you gotta tell everybody about your windows your window frames here oh the window frame so uh so we used uh cedar for the window frames and used a 4x4 for the bottom cut at a 15 degree angle and then a nice big three by six rough cut on the top uh with some just some rough cut two by fours on the side so use some nice decorative um timberlock bolts for the outside to really make it stand out i really wanted to get that three-dimensional look to it um so that you know it's kind of a an eye catchy popping um wow effect and interestingly you know with the the stain use the dark walnut stain on that as well and see the contrast right because of the rough cut of the board absorbed a lot more of that dark stain so you get a nice contrast on the house all right guys that's a little bit about the outside of the house but we want to take you inside and if you've noticed we don't have any gutters yet well we're holding off on that because we get a lot of snow up here you'll see in some of our videos how much snow we do get so let's go inside show you what we've been doing hey guys welcome to our mountain home let's show you what's been going on in the kitchen so we've got some really cool videos one is on our concrete countertop that we did ourself look deeper into the countertop and you can see the aspen leaves that we inlaid into the into the cement right here in the basement when we built the countertop one of our more popular videos is the tongue and groove pine ceiling so the whole installation of the ceiling of the kitchen and our loft area we did ourselves but let's take you to our uh spiral staircase it's our current project right and kind of the centerpiece of the house kind of the piece of art so to speak a custom handmade spiral staircase we actually got the wood from down the street a log had fallen across the road that's another video where we went and hauled it off got it milled up and uh and then yeah designed and start putting it together so we've taken that wood and we've turned in a lot of different projects we actually have uh we'll show you our vanity which is made from that same wood that fell from a tree that's right in our whole county yep so we go into the bathroom so i know the bathroom isn't the pride and joy of every home but for us it is because you know we've spent so much time without facilities when we were living in the basement you know we didn't have running water we didn't have a bathtub but now we've got a whole vanity we've got the bathtub and as you can see here the um the the top of the counter is from that milled wood from that fallen tree we were telling you about so brian also made these custom sink bowls this was before we even moved here so we were dreaming years before we even started building these are concrete sink bowls as well i think the important thing guys is if you have dreams like this just realize it's a work in progress it takes a lot of time it's taken us years but don't lose sight of your dream because you can always throw those elements they come together at some point and they have for us and in fact the beauty is in a lot of the details for us there's parts of our home that make it really special so when you get involved in a big project like this a lot of times you find yourself you know finding the inner artist that you didn't even know that you had so what you're looking at here are the door headers and we what we did was trace woodland scenes on each door and then burned them with a wood burning tool so every door has its own unique scene so it was always our dream to have a rustic home and so we thought timber frame would be a really good way to do it so we got some beams from mill in idaho and then we did all of the jointer work the planning the cutting the staining assembly on our own and so it was quite the project quite the learning process and we did a great job i thought do you see why i'm here i just the amount of work that brian and amy have put into this place i mean from the blueprints to the logs to milling logs to building your own vanities to concrete countertops to other projects you have going on right now so you've got a huge deck out front here that's kind of right in behind them uh beautiful alpine views and you're also working on a retaining wall right now retaining wall yep it's over 100 feet long wow that's awesome so this is the part where we tell you guys to go check out these guys channel so colorado mountain living amy and brian two great people just living their dream here in the alpine country of colorado it's super fun guys again there'll be a link posted to what this looked like before so we went through this place two years ago there'll be a link at the end of this video and there'll be a link to their channel so you can jump on and subscribe and follow these guys through their journey pretty awesome guys thanks a lot well air shake social distance shake colorado social distancing thanks a lot for having me here guys can't wait maybe next time me and mrs stoney ridge will come and stay for a week or so and we can wear out our welcome guys we'll see you next time on the stoney ridge farm channel we've got some really cool stuff tomorrow's video will be with temple grandin we're going to have an interview with temple grandin if you don't know who she is she's voted one of the top 20 most influential people in the world it's gonna be awesome we'll see you guys next time check out colorado mountain living all right give me the woof there we go look at that hold on look at this look at that view isn't that amazing live your dreams guys live your dreams that's what this is all about live your dreams see you next time it's outtake times ma'am what if you had a man