When any future grandkids of ours flip through the family photo album – or electronic equivalent thereof – they probably will figure Grandma and Grandpa must have had a screw loose.

Or, in our case a flange, hinge and bolt, too.

That’s because we (actually, the culprit is my husband, but since we buy into God’s view that two become one in marriage, I’m implicated) pretty much define the seasons of our lives by our building projects. We are either contemplating, in the midst of or newly finished with a construction project that absorbs our time, energy and artistic sensibilities.

Being that blueprints are my husband’s reading material of choice and I’m his sounding board, we discuss structural beams (“Glue-lams? Over my dead body!”) with the intensity we once saved for our hopes, dreams and figuring out how to pay for three simultaneous college educations. Our passion for all things galvanized doesn’t, we’ve found, take a vacation when we do.

During a recent trip to southern California and Arizona, Beatrix Potteresque jack rabbits solemnly watched as we hacked and cheated our way through a couple of rounds of golf, mourning doves served as our alarm clock and cactuses timed their annual bloom to coincide with our visit. But downloading our pictures post-vacation, it was apparent nature’s Kodak moments were not our priority.

There is a photo of my husband, John, against a stunning desert backdrop, but I think he’s only in the picture to show the scale of a rusted I-beam with which we felt a particular affinity. Photographically, we demonstrated an unnatural fondness for contemporary wrought iron handrails, electric gates with torch-cut images of the Rincon Mountains and boldly painted doorways in Tucson’s barrio district.

Close ups of our sun-kissed faces? Dream on. Our camera instead captured clever ways to disguise iron-oxide run-off from core 10 steel and inspired uses for hog mesh.

As memorable as the night tucked under a goose-down comforter in our desert bed and breakfast listening to coyotes howl was, it was equaled by our excitement over discovering rusted-steel garage doors with a lacquered finish that actually looked three-dimensional from behind our Polarized sunglasses.

This is not to say that we’ve lost that lovin’ feeling after 32 years of marriage. Our vacation photos actually conjure up precious memories along with stellar architectural details.

One of my favorite family photos is of the family posed under an ornate stucco doorway of our vacation casita in Paradise Valley, Ariz. Had the camera been aimed a bit higher, you could see the shortwave antenna John wrapped around a flip-flop and flung onto the roof to better his radio reception and create one of the kids’ best vacation memories.

Last Sunday, I wound up at my fifth straight WSU Mom’s Weekend at a coffeehouse with my three children. When I download my pictures I know there will be precious shots of the kids, who are poised to begin real-world jobs and create their own family photo albums.

Habits die hard, though, as I handed my camera to my younger son and asked him to snap one last picture: the perforated, corrugated metal paneling lining the coffeehouse walls.

Chip off the old block? He sure is. And lucky for us, he’s a construction management major, too.