The Phoenix Motel

Journal Entry No. 2

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