A Keen Eye for Artful Architecture
Thank you for inspiring an appreciation for the beauty and symmetry of well-designed architecture. I remember seeing you draft home plans for custom homes for customers seeking to create a comfortable dwelling. Your designs incorporated practical planning, solid construction, and visually appealing elevations that enhanced the neighborhoods in which they were built. Just yesterday, while looking for a home in which Joan's niece and her family have moved into in Orem, we drove past a home on 950 west I remember working on in the mid-seventies. I pointed it out to Joan. It needs some touch up and renovation, but the shake roof (I remember having to load bundle by bundle up a ladder onto the roof), is still in place. It is a unique-looking home, and I am proud to point it out and say, 'There's one I helped my daddy build!”
Utility and Creativity
Thank you for showing us how to make things for our families that we need and want in a creative and economically affordable way. You showed us how to use your knowledge of building to satisfy needs in renovating our home, adding a door to the back yard, building a fence, creating a shuffleboard court, digging down a three-foot deep pit to keep the trampoline at a level that is lower to the ground while being mounted on brick pillars. You beautified our home by remodeling the roof line and replacing the shingles, by breaking out the asphalt driveway to replace it with concrete.
When you needed a camper shell on your Datsun pickup, you built it from plywood. When you needed a tool box for the Dodge truck, you custom built it to hold your tools. In so many ways you leveraged your ingenuity to solve problems and create fixtures, do repairs, build cabinets and kitchen tables, both for your business and for our family's needs. Your example has taught us to employ more of our own resources and abilities to solve problems like you have done for us.
A Personal Gift to Design and Build My Own Home
Thank you for teaching me principles and techniques I could employ to eventually build my own home which Joan and I have lived in the past 34 years. While laboring beside you as a youth in a home building project, you gave me an “ah hah” moment when you stated that the on-the-job training you were giving me would be of value later on when I needed to build my own home. That prediction was fulfilled only 12 or so years later. Then you added to that gift the priceless value of drawing the plans so my contractor could proceed with the construction. Then you added to that gift again by designing, building, and delivering the cabinetry needed for the home. You later added to that gift by spending a week with me sheet rocking, taping, and mudding my basement. All these gifts we benefit from every day.
