My Perfect “Blindo”

I have spent a good deal of time sitting in a deer blind. Not nearly as much as I would have liked to, but still, I have braved a lot of hours either shivering, sweating, fighting mosquitos and finally, contorting to get a good shot. In all of those years I have never hunted in a blind that I built myself. Most of the blinds I have ever hunted in are made of plywood and 2 x 4s and are pretty basic. When the cold wind blows, they don’t offer much protection. For years, I got to hunt at my Uncle Jim and Aunt Nell’s ranch in Floresville, Texas with my dad, my brother Jeff, and my son TJ. My dad and Uncle Jim had built two blinds. Both were in the oak trees on the far side of the ranch. One we called the “Green Blind”, and the other was “The Brown Blind” for obvious reasons. But the best blind Uncle Jim ever put on his place was a 6x8 foot “Tough Shed” that we always referred to as “Uncle Jim’s Blind”. What made the blind so special was that it was roomy enough for 2 or three people at once and it was practically soundproof. Eventually my brother Jeff bought a little propane heater that we would use on cold winter days. In Uncle Jim’s Blind, hunting was more about bonding and being close to the people I love. It was a time to really talk and visit as we would park at the gate, walk through the woods in the dark and get in the blind an hour before sunup. Those times are some of the best in my memory. My son TJ shot his first buck in that blind, a ten pointer whose antlers he has on the wall of his house to this day. Then over a decade ago our little hunting club suffered a tragic loss. Uncle Jim died of cancer, but we carried on the tradition. In the blind was one of his Sam Houston Cigars that he loved to smoke as a reminder that whenever we hunted in his blind, he was still with us, even though it was probably those cigars and a whole lot of cigarettes that took him. My aunt let us hunt there for several years until her son decided there were too many houses around the ranch and that we couldn’t hunt anymore. A couple of years after that, my dad died. I would have like to have spent the last couple of seasons in the blind with him but in his later life he was in his 80s and had a very hard time walking through the woods and he would only do evening hunts rather than stumble through the woods in the dark.

Still to this day, whenever I go deer hunting, I am never alone. My thoughts are always with my dad, my uncle Jim, my son TJ and my brother Jeff.

With that in mind now that I am retired and have a deer lease near our home, I set out to build the perfect deer blind. I call it my “Blindo”. Just like when someone builds a metal house, they call it a “Barndominium” or “Barndo” for short, my friends have dubbed my deer blind my “Blindominium” or “Blindo”.

I started out with a steel frame made of square tubing on wheels that was originally used to ship a big piece of industrial equipment that was 8 feet wide, 5 feet deep and 5 feet high, that I found on Facebook Marketplace. I then found some surplus 4 x 8 sheets of 1 ½ inch foam board and put it all around the inside of the frame. Then I put steel panels around the outside and roof. I bought tilt-up deer blind windows that can stay closed to keep the cold wind out until I’m ready to shoot, and I put carpet and padding that the guy left in the workshop in our shed when we bought our house. My favorite touch is that I used live edge cedar I bought from a sawmill near us and built a beautiful shooting bench just under the windows, the entire width of the blind, deep enough to use sandbags to shoot. With the insulation, it is basically a big ice chest that is cold proof, bug proof and practically soundproof. My friend Kim Kozelski in Forney suggested that I should have a Blindo open house and register at Academy and Bass Pro Shop.

I spent weeks building it, getting up at 6am and working until it is too hot. It has been a labor of love because it is custom built to share hunting memories with family, especially my grandkids.