The making of a home

My first post here. An introduction of our project of making a home from an empty patch of grass.

I’m moving. I just packed my books into cardboard boxes. I may not see them for a few years while they sit in storage, so I tucked a note into one of them for my future self to find. I’ve moved a dozen times in the last ten years, and I’m not usually so sentimental, but this time feels different.

Last year, Seth and I bought a 5-acre piece of land near an area we love. It’s a blank slate, no structures, just grassland and a neighbor’s two horses grazing. Soon, we’ll be living there full-time, working on making the place into our home base.

We've been planning and preparing for this for the last nine months. The conversations are romantic and hopeful — what will we build together? — but they’re also dominated by logistics: moving trucks, septic systems, wells, land surveys, zoning laws, concrete, electricity, budgets.

During this planning phase, we’ve had to adjust our original plans significantly and figure out solutions to problems that felt impossible. We’ve rallied each other during frustrating times, and we’ve navigated crazy permitting processes (and, so far, succeeded). Now, we’re about to move there and start the hands-on work.

We have a general idea for our property: a simple house with a little room to grow, heated concrete floors for cold winters, a porch facing the mountains, food and flower gardens, a workshop space, a guest cottage, chickens and maybe a couple of sheep/goats. But this process will be slow and emergent. We’ll start small and grow deliberately, solving problems as they come up and working on new projects when it feels good. Our goal is to have fun with the process of creating a home that evolves with our needs and ways of living.

A place needs time and life to become a real home, to become infused with familiarity and love. You can’t rush it, you can’t fake it.

Seth’s grandparents’ property is such a place. It’s a small house with a couple of acres and plenty of accumulated lore, originally built by his Mormon pioneer ancestors when they came out to settle in Utah. There’s the old hydrangea patch, and the hundred-year-old apple tree that makes amazing pies. There’s the spot past the creek where his great-grandmother dreamed of building a little A-frame with a pitch steep enough to “scare the hell out of the snow”. The living room, which used to be the whole house, has the original light fixture installed when electricity was added to the home, along with the original Edison bulb that’s been burning for 100 years. Seriously. There’s also a piano that Seth’s great-grandfather bought from a Sears catalog in the 1930s. On the walls are paintings of the homestead and family wedding photos taken in the backyard, the old granary and familiar mountain view in the background.

I don’t know if our property will end up becoming a multi-generation home like this, but as it develops over years and decades, I hope it can settle into its own kind of magic, with its own set of stories and artifacts. I hope it will be a place for loving, resting, playing, working, gathering, care-giving, storytelling, creating, and learning.

I’ll post updates here about once a month to document and share what’s coming along on our patch of grass: the challenges, the successes, the mishaps, and maybe some DIY and gardening tips along the way.