I have a story about selling a house and property...

Some years back, before I met him, a friend and his wife divorced. She got the house in town (which he'd built) and he got the undeveloped ocean front property out the road.

My friend is a college professor/architect/house builder/musician and the first thing he did was to build a 10-foot square cabin with a loft then set about doing a house.

He is a meticulous man and does beautiful, exacting work, doing everything from foundations to wiring to cabinetry to windows and doors and floors himself. His surfaces are like silk and everything gleams. By preference he works mainly with white maple and with lots of light. He works by himself, inventing all kinds of things to help him reach cathedral ceilings.

The crawl space under the house is storage, including a freezer; it is fully finished and when he had houseguests he slept down there on a futon.

He first built a 2-bedroom house with two decks. The bedrooms were on the downstairs level and one went up the silky stairs to the living quarters with fantastic views of ocean, islands and mountains. Everything is wood and he designed and built the chairs and sofa and tables himself.

He also built a woodshop that is bigger and better than many a home.

Long story: he met a woman at his father's funeral in Maine and a year later they got married. They needed more room so he added a bedroom and another deck.

Eventually they decided to move to Haines a coastal town about 60 miles from Juneau and listed their home for sale.

First he sold the original cabin- and the buyer hired a helicopter to strap it up and fly it to an island work site. My friend said it was like watching The Wizard of Oz as it flew away.

The realtor listed the property at $700,000 and the ad went out far and wide. Six months later a man in Baltimore, Maryland, wrote a check for $643,000- because his "son needs a place to live while he's going to university in Juneau."

He then hired my friend to add on to the workshop to make it an art studio for his wife were she to visit.

My friend and his wife have now been married just over 10 years and are in the midst of building a house in Haines.

So cast your nets wide, folks.