Letter To My Clients

It was the 1970’s when I remember watching my divorced grandmother run her real estate business in Lewisville, Texas. She was a Realtor and broker, my father a homebuilder and Realtor, and my mother a Realtor, all working out of the same white office building just off Stemmons Freeway. When my parents bought our house in Lake Dallas, it was the original farm house on many acres that were sold to a developer. I spent that decade watching homes pop up all over our neighborhood. As kids, we loved playing in these stick homes – 2x4 framed walls became our life-sized play houses. Some of my earliest memories are with my brother, sister, and neighborhood friends setting up schools, offices, shopping malls, and restaurants all within these stick walls and with a little imagination. Even at a very young age, I remember pondering how these homes would look finished, which rooms would be the bathrooms, bedrooms, and kitchen based on the location of plumbing and windows. As each home was dried-in with locked doors and windows, we’d move on to the next one springing up. After-hours and on weekends, we’d scour the ground for left-behind nails, end cuts of lumber, and other discarded building supplies. It was with these materials that my brother built our tree house, where we spent many nights in sleeping bags lying under the stars. I was surrounded by the building process, and it fascinated me.