Chris Nolan

I write Backyard Builder from a half-acre lot in the North Carolina Piedmont, where my husband Dave and I have spent the last five years building things in the backyard with varying degrees of success and a growing pile of lumber offcuts we keep insisting we'll use for something.

We bought the property because it was the only way to get the land we wanted at a price that made sense: a fixer-upper with a house that needed work and a yard that needed more, on the kind of half-acre where the previous owner clearly had strong opinions about chicken wire. Neither of us had built anything before. Calling a contractor for every project out here would have cost more than the mortgage, so the choice was learn it ourselves or leave it undone.

The shed came first. The plan said one weekend. It took three, cost more than we'd budgeted, and required a Saturday-afternoon run back to the lumber yard after we'd already put the tools away. Our neighbor Dale Thurston leaned over the fence before we'd poured a single footing to tell us our post holes weren't deep enough. We were sure he was wrong. That winter, the shed's footings heaved just enough to throw the whole structure slightly east, and we finally admitted Dale knows more about clay soil than we do. We call the lean character now. Dale calls it "told you so."

After the shed came a chicken coop, then a raised deck that made it through its first North Carolina summer without complaint, then a pergola that almost didn't survive the county permit process. There's a workshop out back now too, somewhere between framed and finished depending on the week, which is its own kind of ongoing argument between us about priorities.