The wife & I acquired 50 acres of private wooded land in a fairly remote location early in the winter months of this year. 2 sides border state land that goes on for what seems like for ever. <snip>
If I were designing the stage....
Four or five tall deciduous trees on the south and west sides of the house to throw shade in the summer. Red oak, Burr oak or Sugar maple would probably do you just fine.
A deck off the south-east corner.
Spin the sucker 30 degrees so it is not built square-to-grid...that is, two walls running perfectly east-west and two walls running perfectly north-south.
Put some pictures of your cousin and other esteemed people in the entry-way. Not to be weird or to make it a "shrine", but to recognize that you share the friendship of these men, and that some lives are so big that they transcend the inconvenience of death. God gives us saints so we have a template; examples of well lived lives for us to imitate.
I second the idea of having a couple of beater guns. A well done billy-bobbed Mauser can be butt-ugly and an absolute joy to shoot. Your neffy is likely to to drag some buddies to hunting camp and you want set them up right.
Along those lines, it is pretty cool if you can have a make-shift shooting range off the deck. An archery target deer set out at 70 yards and a serious backstop is about right. A paper plate is the classic vital-zone target.
I figure that if a new guy can use the deck's railing and put 9-of-10 in the paper plate at 70 yards, he is probably good enough for hunting.
The beauty of using the archery target deer at 70 yards as the platform for the paper plate is that you are teaching the new guy to not shoot until the deer is in the sweet spot....far enough away that it probably cannot hear your heart pounding.....close enough that any coordinated joe-average with a reasonable fire-arm can hit the vitals.
