LOOKING TO STAY IN BUXTON?

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Shaping Our Lives in the Outer Banks

Journal Entry No. 1 – by Hunter

Olivia and I met the way two stars might collide—unexpectedly, and with gravity.

She was visiting the Outer Banks for the summer, and around here, girls—especially the beautiful, bright-eyed kind like her—are a rare commodity. Maybe it’s the salt or the surf, the trucks, the fishing... something about this rugged island just tends to attract more guys than gals. Whatever the reason, I managed to fend off the other suitors long enough to pitch Olivia on my wild idea of building a life out here—not just a vacation, but a vision.

She was from D.C., used to seasons and structure and espresso shots. But there was something in her—just rebellious enough, just tender enough—that let her entertain the dream of starting fresh in this wondrous, windy, and often desolate place.

That dream wasn’t paved in gold. I promised her winters off, tropical getaways, the kind of travels she’d always known before she met me. But season after season, I kept talking her into one more sacrifice. She’d take her hard-earned savings from long shifts as a waitress—often a sum several times what I could manage—and we’d put it toward “someday.”

Someday came unexpectedly.

An old local surfer—one you might know if you’ve been around the lighthouse a time or two—tipped us off to a piece of land just a stone’s throw from the jetties in Buxton. A sacred place, really. Where the waves peel right and the sky feels bigger. We looked at our pockets and knew we had no chance. But we made a pact, and we stuck to it.

Eventually, with a little faith and a lot of grace, Olivia’s parents helped us get started. And at just 22 years old, we turned a napkin sketch—a tiny home crossed with a treehouse—into our first home.

It wasn’t built by contractors or capital. It was built by neighbors and friends. People who brought their tools and their time. A debt I still carry, proudly.

Eight years later, the house still isn’t done. But we are. We’ve been shaped by it—by the storms, the setbacks, the scraped knuckles and shared coffee. And every skill we learned—how to dig a footing, how to trust, how to stretch $40—would eventually be what we’d draw from to bring Tower Circle Motel back to life.

This journal is where I’ll keep telling that story, one entry at a time.
Thanks for reading.

—Hunter

The Phoenix Motel

By Hunter

Life in our new house had just started to feel normal again. After years of makeshift living and hammer-swinging weekends, we were finally sleeping beneath a real roof, not half tarped or half planned. That quiet stretch of life gave me just enough stability—and just enough stubbornness—to study for my contractor’s license.

I’ve never been much of a scholar. I wasn’t the kid who breezed through tests. Truth is, it took me all the allowable tries to pass the exam. But I did. Barely. And that paper, that license, opened a new chapter for us.

Almost overnight, we went from patching holes and fixing fences to building houses from the ground up. Olivia handled the calls and schedules while I wrestled plywood and learned to navigate the complexities of clients, subs, and cash flow. It wasn’t always pretty—we got schooled more than once by the School of Hard Knocks—but we were building something real.

We couldn’t see it at the time, but those trials were laying the foundation for something much bigger.

Tower Circle Motel had always been part of my orbit. I surfed behind it as a teenager. I used to weed-whack the yard for $20 and a Gatorade. It was part of the backdrop of Buxton—scrappy, sun-faded, hanging on like the old fishermen who knew where the real waves broke.

So when it hit the market, something stirred.

We had no business buying a motel. But the dream cycle started again. “What if?” we asked. What if we could bring it back to life? What if we could be the ones to write its next chapter?

One conversation led to another, and once again, family stepped in. They believed in us, maybe more than we deserved. And just like that, Olivia and I found ourselves holding the keys to a 1950s motel that hadn’t seen true care in decades.

I remember that first night after closing. The rooms had old heaters that made more noise than warmth. A cold northeast wind blew through the walls like they weren’t even there. I lay in bed thinking, What have we done?

But under the anxiety, there was joy. Because it hadn’t been sold to a slumlord, the kind that slaps vinyl over rot and charges triple in the summer. It was ours. The same couple who’d stumbled their way into a tiny home and scraped their way into a construction business now owned a piece of Buxton’s past—and, maybe, its future.

It was a mess.

The driveway was under water as often as it was dry. The plumbing? Let’s just say some pipes led to nowhere. But we saw what it could be. We had vision. We had resolve.

So we tore into it. Day by day. Inch by inch.

And like a phoenix rising from a salt-rusted parking lot, Tower Circle began to lift its head again.

We’re not done. We might never be. But now, every guest who walks through that courtyard, every bike we lend out, every sunrise we watch from the porch—we feel it. The pulse of something real.

And this time, we’re not just building it for us.
We’re building it for all the ones who still believe in places with soul.

—Hunter

Four Rooms and a Dream

By Hunter

So there we were—keys in hand, vision in mind, sleeves rolled up—ready to open the doors and make a little money back. Or so we thought.

Turns out, the building wasn’t legally operable.

It needed a whole stack of inspections, which it of course failed. The kind of inspections where the inspector doesn't even need to speak—they just raise their eyebrows, and you know it’s bad.

But Olivia and I, maybe stupidly, maybe stubbornly, decided to hang tight. There was still something here. A trace of soul in the woodwork. A flicker in the windows. And yeah, maybe in some dreamy corner of our hearts, we thought we might even get rich.

What we got instead was a very different kind of richness.

That first year, the county let us open only four of the rooms. That’s all they’d sign off on, thanks to an aging wastewater system that barely limped through the health inspection. Fixing it? That would have to wait. The budget was tight. Real tight. Construction wasn’t going to float the mortgage on its own. So we got creative.

We turned those four rooms into little sanctuaries. Olivia cleaned, scrubbed, and styled. I patched, built, and wired. We did our best with what we had—and we made it matter.

Then something unexpected happened.

People started to show up.

The kind of people who had given up on this place. Families who once stayed here religiously, year after year, decade after decade. They’d heard whispers that someone was bringing Tower Circle back. That a young couple had bought Mr. Gray’s old motel and was putting love back into it.

So they came.
And we greeted every one of them.

We heard stories that shook us—guests who’d gotten engaged at Tower Circle. Who celebrated anniversaries here. Who brought their babies here, year after year, until they were old enough to bring their own kids. We weren’t just running a motel. We were opening a time capsule.

Suddenly, my construction work felt different. I wasn’t just fixing walls or replacing old plumbing. I was restoring memory. Rebuilding a piece of someone’s childhood. Giving people back a place they thought was gone forever.

The first season wasn’t flashy. We didn’t strike gold. But we made it through. We held tight. And we managed to save just enough to fix the plumbing in time for season number two.

Now, we were really getting started.

The Year of Synergy

By Hunter

By now, the construction business was picking up. Or at least I was starting to feel like I knew what I was doing. Each deck I built, every subfloor I replaced, every client I earned the trust of—it was all starting to make a little more sense.

But more importantly, for the first time in my life, there was synergy.

Construction and the motel weren’t just coexisting—they were feeding each other. Every extra dollar I made framing a house or patching siding got funneled back into Tower Circle. Every spare afternoon was spent sanding, painting, caulking—whatever it took to keep the dream alive.

Olivia and I were anxious for our first real season: all 11 rooms up and running. After year one’s plumbing nightmare and year two’s patchwork hustle, we needed to catch up. The financial pressure was real. So we pushed. Hard.

Sure enough, as happens here like clockwork, the Outer Banks rental homes started turning over for summer. Just as construction work slowed to a trickle, the motel started to hum. And I mean hum.

I didn’t expect to enjoy it this much.

The daily interactions with guests—some curious, some skeptical, many just delighted—became this whole other rhythm. Every check-in felt like a new story unfolding. Some guests overlooked the mess. Others leaned into it.

They saw the extension cords, the half-finished trim, the power tools on the porch. But they also saw us—working, dreaming, sweating it out. That construction zone became our currency. I found myself saying the same line over and over:

“Hey, sorry about the noise... but if you come back next year, we promise—it’ll be better. We will be better.”

And they believed us.

That second full season was the most core of all. We weren’t polished. But we were committed. And people felt that.

Then came the hurricanes.

They flooded the yard, soaked the drive, turned our parking lot into soup. But the rooms held. The roof held. All the work we did? It held. We stood there at the end of the storm season, muddy boots on the porch, and realized—maybe this place was meant to last. Maybe we were too.

Season three was on the horizon. And this time, we had more than just patched pipes and working AC. We had a vision. A plan to bring flair back to the place. Tower Circle wasn’t just going to be a project anymore. It was about to become a destination again.

No more just surviving. It was time to start shining.