So the day finally came that my husband was able to retire early after 40 years of working as a line crew foreman at the power company. He was so elated to be offered an early retirement, I don't think anything that anyone could have done would have made him change his mind about retiring. I can't say that I blame him. After all, he spent many years climbing poles in lightning storms, working power outages in the middle of Iowa winters when the temperatures and wind chills were in the double digits below zero weather, and spent many summers in one hundred plus degree heat indexes replacing transformers that would burn up from the heat and overloads.

Life was good, the bills were paid up and there was one happy guy at home. He was a great cook, and since I worked ten to fourteen hours a day as a warehouse supervisor, it was going to be great coming home to a clean house and dinner on the table. His passion was woodworking and old cars. We bought a small acreage in the country that had 2 large buildings on it aside from our house, one was a large morton type building for him to have a woodworking shop. He never dreamed that he would have a building even as half as big as this one. He often referred to the phrase from the movie "Field of Dreams" which was "Is this heaven? No It's Iowa".

Four months after we moved to our new place, life turned into a nightmare for us. I had a car accident that left me unable to work, and because of the car accident, the doctors found that I had ovarian cancer. And five months after that, he ended up having a quadruple by-pass. To make things even worse than things already had become for us, the economy started going downhill, and without me working it was going to be very difficult for us to make ends meet.

One night when we were watching TV, an infommercial came on about Tom Peterson's Shed Plans and Designs. It was a CD that you could purchase that included over 12,500 shed and woodworking plans and designs, and also included several bonuses. One of the bonuses was over 1,000 woodworking projects and showed a few of the finished products that the plans were for. I told him that this looked really nifty, and that it had a money back guarantee, so asked him what he thought about us getting the CD and since I was doing some selling on Ebay for a bit of extra income, we could make things and sell them on Ebay. And I told him if we sold just one or two things, we could have our money that we invested in the CD back quickly. So that is what we did.

When we got the CD, we were pleasantly surprised at everything we got with it. The bonuses and extra plans were very helpful. If you look at the picture above, it is one of the things we made. An outhouse toilet paper holder that we made for a friend of ours that had outhouse decor in her bathroom. She was absolutely thrilled with it! And with the homemade bandsaw that he had made, it was much easier to resaw the lumber into thinner stock. So we ended up making several of them and selling them on Ebay. Everyone was thrilled to get them.

It was amazing how many plans 12,000 plans was. There are endless shed plans that are faster, easier and without spending tons of money on them. Great schematics and blueprints as well. There was just everything my husband needed to keep himself from getting bored in his retirement, plus we had ideas and plans for so many things for Ebay that we should never run out of ideas again! I have seen many things that have looked good "as seen on TV" but once you get them they sure don't do what they promise. So, I was happy that it all worked out to be what we were looking for and more.

We were very pleased with the plans and the extras that we got. I wish that we had been able to get them the way they are now sold, because they are available for download to a computer as soon as they're purchased, and it would have been great to have them all available without the CD, but we continue to receive the membership bonuses that came with purchasing the CD, and it never costs us any additional money.

So although we hit a huge bump in the road with our health and the economy, everything has turned out better for us now. My husband builds one or two things a week with his homemade bandsaw. People love the things that he builds for them, and we have a huge number of woodworking plans that we can choose from to make things for us or to sell for a lifetime. So, no, this may not be heaven, but retirement in Iowa has been pretty fun for us since we got the medical situations back under control so we could enjoy the good things that come our way now.