Chris Nolan

I write Backyard Builder from a half-acre in rural North Carolina, where my husband Dave and I have been building things in our backyard for the last five years with varying degrees of success and a slowly growing pile of lumber offcuts we keep telling ourselves we will use for something.

We bought the property because it was the only way to get the kind of land we wanted at a price that made sense. Fixer-upper, large lot, the kind of place where the previous owner clearly had strong opinions about chicken wire. We had zero building experience. Dave had worked in IT support and I had spent twelve years in property management, which gave me a decent sense of project timelines and budgets and a very bad sense of what those timelines and budgets would actually be when applied to something involving lumber, clay soil, and a North Carolina summer.

The shed was the beginning. It took three weekends instead of one, cost more than the plan said, and tilts slightly east in a way we now call character. The chicken coop came next, then a raised deck, then a pergola that almost didn't happen because the permit process in our county involves a particular county inspector who has Very Strong Opinions. Now there's a workshop in the back corner of the lot that is probably sixty percent done, depending on how you count "done."