A dream home come true

In the world of Ken and Kay Lee, a do-ityourself project doesn’t mean doing a little painting, installing a ceiling fan and throwing some petunias in the backyard.

We’re talking about backbreaking, sweaty, get-your-hands dirty, musclesscreaming work. Here are some of the bigger jobs they’ve crossed off their to-do list since their 4,500-square-foot house was built in 2001:

- Put 26 tons of Spanish tile on roof.

- Removed more than 500 spiny yucca plants from the yard.

- Planted 45 pine trees, each from 10 to 18 feet tall.

- Laid 2,000 linear feet of drip line.

- Hand-dug the foundation for a 35-by-50-foot cement-block wall.

- Framed 120 feet of sidewalk in the garden; helped pour concrete.

- Built a 14-by-14-foot concrete pad and a Southwestern kiva fireplace so the grandkids can roast marshmallows.

- Shoveled 30 tons of landscape river rock into a wheelbarrow and moved it to various places on the 1.25-acre site.

- Erected a 170-foot-long split rail fence in the front yard.

- Created a magnificent patio garden filled with flowers, herbs and vegetables.

Now, please pass them the Bengay.

“We’re never done,” says Kay.

These labors of love started when Ken, a school speech therapist, and Kay, who manages a medical practice, got tired of commuting to town from their Gleneagle patio home. Ken’s friend Don Green, a metal sculptor and retired art teacher, had some available property next to his home in a rurallooking neighborhood northeast of North Nevada Avenue and Austin Bluffs Parkway.

When they got the property, the Lees would drive up the dirt road and picnic on their empty lot amid the barren, yuccastrewn hardscrabble, dreaming their dream house.

These days they breakfast on the secondfloor patio of their Southwestern-style home with panoramic views and watch the rising sun bathe the distant Garden of the Gods with gold.

The view from the deck into their courtyard garden is just as charming. The garden’s centerpiece is a 2-ton, moss-covered rock that became a fountain for birds after Ken built a foundation for it and had experts drill into it.

Kay is the gardener who artistically lets the vegetables cozy up among the flowers, and the flowers intertwine with the herbs: lavender, poppies, butterfly bushes, Missouri primrose, daisies, nasturtiums, garlic, mint, lemon balm, spaghetti squash, cucumbers, snow peas, honeysuckle and more grow shoulder to shoulder.

Overseeing it all from outside the stucco garden wall is an unusual, curly willow tree that provides a soft background outside the fence. A blue metal gate opens to the kiva and the pine tree-accented landscape that replaced the bleak blanket of yucca.

The house is a whole other success story — a grand stucco affair with a steam room, open floor plan, an old-fashioned phone booth with a phone that once did service in a New York subway station, a chandelier from the old Antlers hotel and a nook called Kay’s Water Closet, which holds 352 bottles of wine.

Their neighbors have welcomed the transformation of the scruffy site. “I’d never be able to do all that work, put that much effort into a

yard,” says Maxine Green, Don’s wife. “But we are so pleased. It is beautiful and it has really made the neighborhood beautiful.”

To be fair to anyone considering a similarly challenging undertaking, the Lees began with a good set of home-building and gardening skills. Ken learned basic trades at his family’s sheet metal and roofing company in Minnesota, and Kay got her love of gardening and nature from her grandfather, an early environmentalist who took her berry picking in Minnesota.

But they credit their do-it-yourself success to the help they’ve gotten from friends, including Larry Nicks and Ed Micci, who have construction companies and who built the home with Ken’s help.

“We barter. When Micci needs help on projects I say, ‘I’ll give you my labor in exchange for you doing the shelves in my wine closet,’” Ken says. The Lees also credit a bevy of professionals, too numerous to mention here but whom Ken named one by one.

Still, you can’t dismiss the couple’s involvement. Ken saved a lot of money by doing the roof by himself, laying those 26 tons of tile.

He also loves bargains. When a Colorado Springs bar called The Squatting Chicken closed, he rescued its sign and hung it overhead in the garage.

The best deal, he says, was the 15-foot pine trees he got for about $125 apiece when Evergreen Tree Movers moved its business. He spent about $7,000 for the stucco garden wall, which he figures would have cost $25,000 if he hadn’t done some of the labor. The do-it-yourself kiva cost $5,000 instead of $15,000.

A house down the road from the Lees that’s about the same size recently listed for $570,000, and it doesn’t have the landscaping that the couple have put in.

But Ken says he doesn’t know how much his home is worth. “Oh, lordy, I have no idea. What is our hourly labor rate?”

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0371 or carol.mcgraw@gazette.com

BRING IDEAS DOWN TO EARTH

Do-it-yourself tips from the Lees:

- Only start projects you can control, so they won’t overwhelm you.

- Make the house and yard as maintenance-free as possible. For example, the Lees used Trex composite decking that won’t need painting.

- Stay within your budget. If you can’t afford a home improvement, wait and save for it.

- Research everything so you know you are doing it right.

- Shop and compare prices of materials.

- Get professional advice before starting a project.

- Barter, barter, barter. “I’ll work for you for four hours if you help me four hours,” Ken says.

- The more hands helping, the faster it goes.