And so it begins...

The view from the rear of our fresh-cut lot.

Every story has to start somewhere. This one starts in a frozen field of fresh felled pines. (oooh, alliteration) Perhaps it starts with the story before the story...

After a months long search for a new family home, playing the Goldilocks Game whilst living nomadically in hotels, apartments, and rental houses, we inevitably ended up heading down the path to a custom build.

We found our little slice of heaven in a bucolic New England town. A literal sea-change, having spent our lives in cities of various size. A 180 from where we had started looking for homes among the suburban sprawl.  But we believe that trading traffic jams for the serenity of small town life will have invaluable benefits to our lives.

If you listen closely, you can hear
Al Gore weeping.

Our little 2 acre plot is what we consider the "best of both worlds."  It's in a new sub-division of homes, slated for about a dozen good sized single-family homes.  But our lot is located so that it's surrounded on all sides by 50-100 acres of preserved forest.  So we'll have neighbors, but we just won't be able to see the neighbors.  That's a tremendous change for us from city life, where your neighbor is either on the other side of the wall, or at best their kitchen window is only 20 feet from your kitchen window. 

We passed papers (and a duffel bag of dinero) just 2 days ago, and already our builder has the lot cleared. This was just another stretch of forest last week. Our builder rocks. We need to be done and in before the next school year, so he's prepared to keep things rolling along for us.   Huge piles of slaughtered pines is a great start. (The majority of which had trunks twisted with old-growth poison ivy vines.  Good riddance to all)

Insert house A into lot B...
You should see the size of the IKEA box this one came in.