“I didn’t know how to build a house. I figured if someone else could do it, so could I,” he says with a laugh. “I wasn’t too proud to ask questions.” John’s first house—built by hand in the rugged chill of Montana—was off by an inch and a half on one end, and three- quarters of an inch on the other. “But we were warm. And nobody else knew but me,” he says with a grin. Building Through Hardship The early days weren’t glamorous. John, his wife, and their young son lived in their under-construction home, using an outhouse 80 feet from the front door until he could get plumbing in.
“We potty-trained our youngest in that outhouse,” he chuckles.
It wasn’t easy—but it was real.
After selling their Montana home in the dead of winter (a family from Arizona miraculously bought it with four feet of snow on the ground), the Martins packed their lives and moved to Michigan. Then, not long after, back to the mountains of eastern Oregon—closer to John’s aging parents. “They need us now more than ever,” he says. “And I know I’m right where God wants me to be.”
That sense of purpose isn’t just personal—it flows into every home John builds.
54 S P E C I A L E D I T I O N
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