And by busy, I mean eloping, designing a house, having a baby and building said house. It’s been a wild and amazing few years.
I’m very comfortable in the face of the unknown. Being a freelance illustrator, I never know where, when and if my next paycheck is going to come. Calm in the face of chaos and uncertainty is just part of my job. There’s no management to make decisions for me, no HR department to have my back, no set daily routine or schedule. It’s all 100% up to my ability to figure it out. It can all be a bit overwhelming at times, but I’ve learned how not to waste my energy on things I can’t control. So long as I have options to move forward, I’m not going to let negative thoughts slow me down.
This experience came in handy when we decided to build a house. After a year of hopelessly driving all over New England with our realtor and being outbid by $50,000+ cash, like so many other young couples, we were losing hope of every having a home. We had tossed around the idea of building in the past, but it all seemed to risky and we were certain no bank wouldn’t give us a loan for such a project. But, after our 4th failed open house, we decided to walk into the unknown, in the direction of building, to see if there was light on the other side.
First, we threw a bunch of stuff to the wall and explored what was possible. We had always said we would build a yurt, so I looked into kits. The bank wouldn’t give us a loan for a yurt, and they were too expensive to buy cash, so we kept looking. We ran into the same outcome with log cabin kits, modular homes weren’t our style and were at the top of our budget. I spent time on the phone with incredibly kind architects asking questions about what was involved in designing and building our own little box. We started with a tiny home concept which grew into an actual house when we figured, if were going to take out a loan, we might as well do the thing right. Though we are both hobbits at under 5’3”,we have too many hobbies and an 85lb golden retriever to fit into a 400 square foot space.
We started looking for plots of land, some days driving as far as 400 miles across Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Most of the plots we could afford were unbuildable, swamps, ravines and cliffs that sloped into highways. Being buildable was just one of the boxes that needed to be checked if we were to invest everything we had physically, mentally and financially. We had hoped to end up in some semblance of a community, maybe even one where the arts were celebrated and encouraged. We wanted good public schools since we planed on having kids and most important of all, it just needed to feel right; like, good vibes. No amount of smudging and sprucing up could have saved some of the places we visited.
One day, we ended up in the town where Alex, my now husband, after foregoing a wedding in lieu of a down payment and eloping in 2019, went high school. It seemed serendipitous that just a couple days prior, his high school art teachers reached out to ask if we would come in to chat with the students. They connected us with tons of artists in town, which sparked my excitement. Driving through the quaint New England town, I instantly felt at home but, I knew better than to get my hopes up, as we saw 3 overpriced swamp lots that day. As the sun began to set, we made our way down a dirt road to a lake. It was a beautiful lake; big and clean and glistening in the winter sun. The neighborhood was quiet, but the few people we passed walking their dogs waved back to us. I’m one of those insufferable people who waves to everyone. I remember bouncing up and down in my seat squealing “Alex, everyone’s waving! I got a 100% wave return! People are nice here!” The vibes were good.
We drove right past the lot at first, not seeing it and made our way to the top of the hill, where we caught a view of the sunset on the water. I remember thinking; people like us weren’t meant for places like this. Views like these were meant for people who could afford second homes, I had only ever dreamed of being New England lake people. We made our way back down the hill and didn’t even get out of the car to walk around the lot. It was a steep slope that rolled right into wetlands. Alex said, with the price being so low, it probably wasn’t buildable and I agreed, adding that the bugs would also be terrible. So we drove home, waving at one last person as the sparkling water receded in our mirrors.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept dreaming of our little house on the lake. We could make it work. If anyone could, it was us. We would design a house that would suit the landscape, maybe a walkout basement to work with the slope, we’d buy tiki torches and bug spray. That familiar swell of excited, unflappable determination grew in my chest. I might call it sheer will, but, this force in my heart is made of whispers from a magical place. I’ve learned not to fight it’s current, but to listen and dance to it’s music. “Alex” I said in the dark. “We need to go back” We followed my intuition back to the lot the next day and got out for a look. Our skeptical pacing turned into excited brainstorming. There was potential here so, we drove away that day, blabbing ideas and planning next steps.
We contacted our realtor and started searching for the bad news. It was way too cheap to be buildable, something was wrong with it. Maybe it couldn’t have a septic tank; thats ok! We’d do a grey water system and composting toilet! Maybe it was a habitat for an endangered species of salamander; no way around that, that would really suck. Nobody was going to help us figure out if it was buildable or not, we had to do our due diligence to check with every governing office in our state and town to see if the way forward was clear. To our utter amazement, it was. We, were going to be lake people.
Alex, had a good friend, Scott, from high school who worked as an architect at a firm in Boston. He had never designed anything completely solo, but he was incredibly talented and certified so, we got to work on designing our home together. I had a purple legal pad full of sketches and ideas for the house. The concept was modeled after a tiny home with a single pitched roof and modern, passive functionality, to keep things energy and cost efficient. We drew the square footage on pavement with chalk to get an idea of the size and eventually, Scott made all our crazy ideas real, with a computer rendering. The final home ended up looking a lot like that first drawing on the purple legal pad.
We needed to build it ourselves because couldn’t afford to pay contractors and workers. So, we started looking for a bank that would fund 2 totally inexperienced builders. After a bunch of searching, we ended up with an amazing credit union, who deserves all the kudos for believing in us and being kind, supportive and communicative from the purchase of the land to the first mortgage payment. We bought the land, we made the plans, had them certified by an engineer, built a budget, pulled permits and did our research on materials and methods for homebuilding. It was time to get to work.
This, was the point of no return, if we wanted to stop now, we could sell the land and only be out a few thousand dollars. But, once we started clearing and building, we would lose everything we had saved and then some. We tried not to think of the worst, as it was a waste of time and energy. We also tried not to think too far ahead, as the mountain we were about to climb was a behemoth of time, physical labor and risk.
We moved like water, finding cracks to slip through when our path was blocked. Pivoting, problem solving, brainstorming, repeat. Luckily, Alex had grown up in the area and was able to call on some old friends who knew someone who knew someone for anything we needed. Tree clearing, excavation, plumbing, electrical. I remember being so overcome with joy and relief that we had ended up in a community where our friends and neighbors genuinely had our backs and wanted us to succeed.
Right before we started clearing the land, I found out I was pregnant. Poor timing yes, but we were thrilled. It was fourth of July weekend, I was approaching my second trimester and we were waiting on the cement truck to come pour the foundation, so we could start building. It didn’t show up, setting us back another 2 weeks. We were heartbroken, wondering how many of these setbacks were ahead of us. It had already been over a year since we bought the land, how long would this take? We questioned our endurance, shrinking under the weight of unknown variables ahead of us. The fear started to open cracks in our fortitude and doubt dripped like acid onto our determination. The magnitude of the project for 2 people with full time jobs threatened to crush us in this quiet moment of existential contemplation. With the baby on the way, we felt more pressure than before, to get it done as quickly as possible.
That independence day, we took a deep breath, patched up the holes in our spirit to keep the fear at bay and took the paddle boards out on the water to watch the fireworks. It didn’t matter how long it was going to take. We wouldn’t let fear and pressure ruin this experience. We resolved to move swiftly and efficiently, but not rush. We had one shot at this, we were going to do it right, by riding the currents and having fun. It was kind of like running a marathon. It’s painful yes, but kind of enjoyable if you let yourself relax and go with the flow; and the high at the end makes it all worth it.
Our optimism was tested when we put up the first wall. My dad, Alex’s dad and uncle were the first family crew to come help. We spent the day measuring, setting up string lines, cutting 2x4s and nailing them into a frame. Our family is amazing, though it’s guaranteed they will have strong opinions on how things should be done. All of the well intentioned wisdom and input led to us second guess ourselves. At the end of the day, we realized the studs were off by a small measurement which was big enough to make nailing the Zip sheets later on, a gigantic pain and cause material waste. Our family tried to convince us that it would be fine, and it wasn’t the end of the world, but, we didn’t want to start this project off with a “good enough” mindset. We made a mistake, and the right thing to do was fix it. So, that night, after everyone left, Alex and I stayed at the job site and took the wall apart. The next day, when our family arrived to see only 1/4 of wall, a shocking difference from the full wall they left the prior night, they were very confused and surprised. On the bright side, the experience taught us to trust our research and our instincts and be confident and decisive in our knowledge because we were very grateful for the fix later on.
We were making progress. It was really starting to look like a house. Our sweet, friendly neighbors stopped by to welcome us to the neighborhood and bring us water on the sweltering days. We basically lived out of a Pod storage container and survived on gas station snacks and dunkin doughnuts. We brought our computers to the job site to work our actual jobs and on breaks, we met with inspectors and wielded saws and nail guns in every spare moment.
All the while, I was getting more and more pregnant. I wasn’t able to do some of the heavier lifting since the insulated Zip sheets and 2” subfloor were around 40-50lbs each. Though, what little work I was able to do before lifting became a problem kept me in good shape throughout my pregnancy. As much as it killed me not to be using my hands, there was a lot of paperwork to do, phone calls to make and continuous research and planning to suss out. The fatigue and nausea convinced me not to put up too much of a fight when my family would snatch tools and materials out of my hands.
The rest of the Summer was a blur of long days under the sweltering sun and pouring rain, cooling off in the lake, laughing and cheering, sighs of frustration, gatorade, emotional trips to the obgyn, granola bars, driving to places to satisfy food cravings, bonding and problem solving with family and friends, making new friends and getting worked up over worries that turned out alright in the end.
In late September, our son was born. We had no windows in yet, some of the zip sheeting on the sides were still missing and rain pooled on the subfloor since we had not yet installed a roof. This was possibly the most difficult point of the whole build. Not because of our newborn, but because Alex and I are two halves of a whole. In this moment, we had to divide and conquer. Alex spent the first 4 days with me at my parents house after we got back from the 4 nights in the hospital. Then, he spent his paternity leave driving the hour to the job site, harnessing up and lugging the cumbersome, 100lb sheets of Advantech onto the roof frame, by himself, in the bite of the impending winter. Looking back, I’m still not sure how we did it. But love can make people do amazing things.
We were finally ready for windows! They had been sitting under tarps for weeks on a palette outside and the prospect of installing was exhilarating, though a bit daunting. Some of our windows spanned 7 feet wide and over 250lbs. We rallied the gang of dads and uncles and used winches and pulleys to get the job done. We spent Iska’s first Halloween installing the basement windows, one of which would become his bedroom. I walked him around the room telling him all the cool stuff he would do in here one day. Rock climbing wall? Slide? Treehouse? Anything was possible now.
That winter was freezing. We ran propane heaters as plumbing and electrical were installed and we refined details to get ready for insulation and drywall. The final stretch of our journey, though physically cold, is full of fond memories that made the un-insulated shell feel like a cozy cottage in the woods; eating takeout and nursing Iska in camp chairs, our friends announcing their pregnancy over a box of munchkins and camp coffee, my screeches of happiness too loud in the echo of the hollowed walls and bare subfloor. My first mother’s day under a string of warm toned shop lights, bundled in hats and sweaters, cooking brunch for my mom, mother in law and the rest of our family on the Coleman stove, christening our kitchen to host a lifetime of meals and celebrations.
I started to get back to some heavy lifting and my jobs included dawning a tyvec suit and gas mask to install Rockwool insulation and later cover all 1200 square feet of subfloor with vinyl flooring. Alex was back at work at this point so, sometimes I would come to the site by myself to chip away in the dust and other times he would bring his computer and work with me on his breaks. It felt good to be a team again. For the interior details, so much of our friends and family stoped by to help for a day here and there. It warms my heart to look at every part of this house and know that each spot was touched by laughter and love.
We had only bought one piece of furniture, a couch. We had never had our own couch, and the prospect of sitting together as a family and showing Iska all our favorite movies while snacking on homemade popcorn, was one of the visions that kept us motivated during the tougher slogs. A couple days after the couch was delivered, we couldn’t help ourselves, the house was insulated and mostly drywalled, we had extension cords for power, we didn’t have running water or drywall but, the outhouse was only a 30 second walk. We hauled the couch inside, tore off the plastic and spent our first night in the house.
The rest of the build was a steady pace of fun, creative finishing touches like, ordering cabinets, building countertops, hanging art and installing lighting fixtures. I thrifted cheap old dressers from Facebook marketplace and turned them into bathroom vanities to save money. After what seemed like a lifetime, our home was finally finished. Well, mostly. We still have 2x10s for our stair railings and none of the flooring trim is on, but, it’s been approved by the building inspector and we’re paying our mortgage.
After going through all this at once, nothing seems impossible anymore. I’ve just turned 30 and I feel like all my dreams have come true. I’ve heard dozens of horror stories of people building their own homes and looking back, amazed doesn’t seem to cover how I feel about making it all the way, relatively unscathed. We were truly lucky and I’ll never stop feeling overwhelmed with gratitude for all of it. In the end, it all worked out and the bugs really aren’t as bad as I thought they’d be.
