In 2009 Suzanna and I bought a house on Lake Lanier. I was doing a lot of sailing on the lake and the sailing club was about 1.5 hours from our Peachtree City house. The vision was then to buy a house in a depressed market (housing market down and a drought causing record low lake levels). The house we bought needed some work and it was a perfect fit for what we wanted. Early into this remodel project I decided to add a front porch and raise the roof. At that point I made the decision too design any changes around a future model railroad.

So when we built the porch I added a plastic tube that could be utilized as a tunnel for the model railroad to pass through. As I improved the driveway I left space beside the house for the track to run. As I tore down a room in the garage and rebuilt the walls around the stairs, I left space for the trains to be stored. I didn’t have an exact plan nor layout but I tried to keep each change in the house oriented around a model railroad if I was to build one.

So Mr. Handyman took a lot more of my time away from fixing up the house but as I added technicians, I had them work at my lakehouse when it was slow to help them learn new skills and to provide them an income during these slow times.

Well this past Fall of 2015, we finally finished the major renovations. I was able to finally close the permit and move on to the phase of the model railroad.

So then I started to layout my model railroad. I took exact measurements. I took height measurements . I purchased a mdoel railroad program to design the layout.  I loaded all of the data and began to design several different layouts.