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 Welcome to Swanfire Hall, the virtual home of the McKee-Schwenke family. Please bear with us as we slowly add content to this site. As you take a look around you will see why the website is one of our lower priorities. We have been gradually creating content in fits and starts in the quiet moments. We are located near Hillsborough, NC, and this site is for our family to share things that we have written, crafts that we have made, information we have discovered, and news about our small farm, including things that we may potentially have for sale one day. 
In December 2007 we moved into our brand new home, which sat
in a mud pit with no landscaping and odds and ends such as the mantel over the
fireplace still missing. Five days later Alfred was born, and in the time
since we have added six four-legged critters as well, with all the time
investment that entails. Looking around at the scraggly flower garden, a few
tomato and squash plants, the rosebushes, the foundation plants which are thinking of getting to a useful size, the goat pen, and the large patches of groundcover
starting to spread, our smallholding looks like it just might grow into
something someday. Not that the work will ever be finished. But just like
this website, at least there is a framework onto which it can grow.What's in a name? Swanfire Hall is our home and smallholding, situated on 4.5 mostly-wooded acres about five miles north of Hillsborough, NC. Our name comes from our surnames: Schwenke is related to German Schwann (swan) and McKee comes from Gaelic Mac Aoidh (son of fire). 
Why build instead of buy a house?A few years back when we were looking for a house times were definitely not as they are now. It was a seller's market and there were very few houses for sale. It quickly became apparent that we wouldn't be able to find what we were looking for. After all, this is the era of huge, vinyl, houses on postage-stamp-sized lots, and we wanted a nice quality but not huge house on a large lot. By building we were able to get not exactly what we wanted, but the closest that fit within our budget. Now we have a large enough house on several acres of woods; we can't see the road through the trees, and you can't see the house from the road. By building a smaller house we could get nicer features such as hardwood floors and a cathedral ceiling. We are very happy with the results of having a custom home built, but before you decide that's what you want to do, be aware that it took about three years from starting to look into the process to moving in. It's a frustrating path with lots of dead ends. Obviously it's possible, but you have to fight for it and stay on top of it, making phone calls and bothering contractors to get their estimates to you and weighing costs of options. And it has a very long wait. It is not a project for those who aren't absolutely sure this is what they want, or for the faint of heart. |