A chandelier hangs over the living room from chains he made of wood. Before hanging the chandelier, he hung a swing from the chain, and he and June used to swing back and forth across the living room.

"I'm sure neighbors thought we were nuts," says June.

The house is in a perpetual state of remodeling. Challis has been working on a three-story, 27-by-40-foot addition to the back of the house that includes an underground shop/garage.

Did June know he was like this before they married? "I had a clue — but not like this," she says.

While still a student at Murray High School, he suspended his bed from chains attached to the ceiling. One time he got bored and dug a hole through the foundation of his parents' home and then through dirt to make another way to get out of the house.

After his mother asked him to grind wheat, he got tired of doing it by hand so he removed a tire from his bike and rigged it up to the wheat grinder with pulleys and belts and ground 50 pounds of wheat by pedaling his bike.

"The only thing he can't do is grow hair," says June. "He does everything better than I do, even cook."

When the local Boy Scout troop needed a sleigh for a winter camp, Challis built an elaborate wooden sleigh with bent wood and lattice work. "He couldn't just make a simple normal sleigh that got the job done; it had to be a work of art," says June.

Like Miller, Challis never took a college degree, in part because the University of Utah didn't hold classes on the ski slopes. Eventually, his need to build and create gave him direction. After seeing photographs of beautiful, circular stairways, he decided he wanted to build stairways, even though he had no training.

"So I went looking for someone who wanted stairs," he recalls. "I found someone. He got the stairs, I got an education."

He started a company called Challis Stairways, which grew from one employee to 55 and built circular stairs around the world. The company grew so big over the next 20 years that Challis found himself in the administrative end of the business and didn't like it.

"I was more comfortable with a tool in my hand than a pencil," he said.

He sold the company, then went to work for the new owners in their research and development department building automated machinery for making parts to stairways. He took out 12 patents on machines and hand tools he developed relating to the stair industry.

Challis left the company when it left the state. Miller hired Challis to design his Mayan Restaurant — the overall theme of the restaurant and the tree houses, walkways, murals, bridges, cliffs. When that was completed, he took up fine art.