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WEB-EXTRA Contractor Profile: Meri and Tim Tenhet; Delta House From "Be Your Own Contractor: Vacation Homes" episode DBCV-104

Homeowners Tim and Meri Tenhet.

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Following below is some additional information on the Mississippi-delta vacation house and the homeowners featured in this episode of DIY's Be Your Own Contractor: Vacation Homes.

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	Meri Tenhet
	Tim Tenhet
	The Tenhets worked with their friend, architect Brian Brown, to develop their floor plans.

Owner/Builders

Meri and Tim Tenhet.

Bios

Tim is the director of sales and marketing for a large, bi-coastal cotton company. Meri is a culinary school-trained chef who was in the catering business and now does cake decorating and runs the cafeteria at her daughter's school. Their daughter is nine and they live in Clarksdale, Mississippi -- home of the blues.

Home Specifics

2200 square feet, 3 BR/3 BA elevated cabin. It is elevated 16-1/2 feet off the ground.

Location

The location of the cabin is located just outside of Clarksdale, about a half-mile from the Mississippi River and behind the Mississippi River levee. The house is in the Ward Lake Hunting Club, one of the oldest establishments of its kind in the Mississippi Delta.

Why build there?

Meri: "I think what makes it so special is that it's home. And I think more times than not people always want to come back home, so this is home to us, this is where we grew up, we feel like it's a great place to raise a child and spend lots of good quality time together. And it's very peaceful out here."

Tim: "All my life my father and brothers, we've spent our winters hunting by the Mississippi River by the River levy, it's something we grew up doing, and I got away from it for quite a while and when I moved back to Mississippi ten or fifteen years ago one of the highest things on my priority list was to have a place where we could spend our weekends with our family."

Why act as their own contractor?

Meri: "I think we were hands-on mostly for cost reasons. You know, we knew that if we hired a contractor to do it all, then they're going to get a certain percentage of you know every bit of work that's done. So cost wise, we thought we could do it ourselves. It was very important to me. I'm creative I guess, by nature, so I wanted this to be a piece of us, and not something someone else had put down on paper, and this is how your house is going to be, and I felt like if it was our home, then we needed to be a big part of it. That was important to us together."

Why build an elevated home?

Since the house is located in the Mississippi River floodplain, they were required by code to elevate the house 16.5 feet off the ground -- i.e., one foot above the 100-year base flood-elevation.

Involvement in the construction

Meri was on site virtually everyday during construction. She did some faux finishing of the kitchen cabinets. Tim worked on the grounds and did a number of tasks throughout the construction of the house.

Interesting facts

Instead of putting the home on stilts, they used timbers made from whole trees. Each tree was shaved down to the appropriate diameter and length. Most of the tree poles are roughly 24 ft high (8 ft. buried and 16 ft. exposed).

Challenges

Tim: "The vast number of decisions that go into building a cabin. In many respects it was more involved, particularly because of the elevation of 16.5 feet."

Meri: "Staying there most of the time. A lot of times it took most of my day out here. I had never done this before, so therefore I was learning as we went along. Even though the [the workers] were skilled professionals, we still had a lot of back-and-forth as to what I wanted done and what they were used to doing -- if it was something different. "

Tim: "Even though we had an architectural plan in terms of a floor plan, after that it was pretty much winged . . . and Mary made a lot of those decisions on a day-to-day basis. We just didn't we didn't have a grand plan that we followed all the way through. A lot of times we just had to react instead of act."

Meri: "The subcontractors are not just working on one job at a time. They usually have several jobs going at once and, if there was a problem with scheduling, I would have to sit back take a deep breath sometimes and just wait on them to finish another job -- especially if a rain was moving in or if there was something they were trying to finish for someone else. At times that could that did get hairy."

Advice

Tim: "Don't fall into the trap, like we did and I'm sure many people do, where you're building, getting ambitious and anxious and agreeing to do more and more and more."

Meri: "Constantly communicate. Communication is key in anything you're doing together, any project big or small. It would probably have been a lot easier on both of us had we had more extensive planning before we started, but we learned a lot, we grew a lot, we probably fought a lot too -- but it all worked out great in the end.

Tim: "When you're responsible for the project and you're making the decisions and you can't blame anyone else for the mistakes that pop up you deal with it that's the way that it is you move on, but the upside is you get all the glory too when it turns out great."

RESOURCES :

Resources for Be Your Own Contractor: Vacation Homes episode 104: Mississippi-Delta House

Majesty of the Mississippi Delta
To order this book from Amazon.com, click here.

My Mississippi
by Willie Morris, David Rae Morris
To order this book from Amazon.com, click here.

Square Books
Oxford, Mississippi
Website: www.squarebooks.com

Federal Emergency Management Administration
Website: www.fema.gov