We’re currently done with the foundation. To date, we have poured 60 yards of concrete without a cement truck, that’s 240,000 lbs of concrete, or 120 tons, at 10,400ft. And we did that in about a month. For the floor we poured another 10 yards with a cement truck. After doing the footings and walls without a cement truck, we found a concrete company that would drive their truck up the hill to us. We were grateful to have the truck for pouring the cement floors.

It’s incredible how fast Adam has been moving considering the challenges we’ve faced. The first big hurdle was the road that you have to drive up to get to the house. It was so rough that Adam didn’t think we could get the dump truck up the road with the cement powder, sand and rock for the concrete. So, we had to fix the road with an excavator and by hand. After a few days of fixing, the county road guy heard about it and got quite concerned and stopped us. Afterwards, he saw how much we had improved the road, softened it up, and now he’s best friends with Adam. Adam seems to have that affect on people, it think it’s one of his superpowers.

Once we got the road fixed up, we got the loaded dump truck up it, which was a huge win. If we hadn’t been able to do that, we would’ve had to rent a rock truck to bring material up the hill which would’ve been super expensive.

My biggest fear is that Adam is going to do incredible work and build this thing fast, but I’m not going to do it the justice it deserves on the advertising front. The real issue is, and I learned this from Birch Creek House and Escalante Cliff House, is that Airbnb and Vrbo won’t let you advertise a property until you’re almost done. So, if you want to get reservations before that, you’ve got to do that through your own website. I accomplished this with the Birch Creek House, but honestly it was on a pretty small scale, I had probably 5 reservations before it went up on Airbnb/Vrbo. I want to do way better than that this time around, not because we’re going to run out of money if we don’t start collecting deposits, but because as soon as we start getting high dollar reservations, we’ll know for sure that this lodge is going to be a commercial success and stress levels will come waaaay down.

The other lodges in the area are well known, don’t advertise at all, and do incredibly well. Knowing that was what made me so confident to do this project in the first place. I think if we advertise well, we could have 50+ nights booked by the end of the year. We’ll start taking reservations for the summer of 2026 to begin with, when we’re absolutely sure the lodge will be done, and as time goes on, the opening date will be moved closer. I’ll start taking reservations sooner and sooner, hopefully we get bookings for the winter, which would be a huge bonus.

Next up: Getting serious about advertising and framing