“We found the house about a month after Harper was born. We were sitting in a cafe eating brunch, right after having done her newborn photos and we saw this house pop up in the email and it seemed to hit everything we were looking for. We thought we could just go by and peek in the windows, and sure enough there was an open house. We were there for 2 hours, it was a super long time. As soon as George walked in, he started measuring with his arms, seeing if we could take this wall down and move these windows. It needed a lot of work but it was move in ready and that was important for her. We talked about other houses, about finding dumps, and there no way we wanted to move in with a newborn and have it just be an awful place to live. Since George had a construction background, he knew that was something he could offer to us as a family, that would be his contribution and that he you would be able to buy some sweat equity with that. The drivers were that we needed more space and we wanted to be homeowners. George is constantly working on projects so to have our own home where we could do that, and with Kona, our dog at the time, she really needed a yard. She would run away constantly and it really became a problem, she would never do that before in her life.
We had been to a ton of open houses just to see what was out there, to see what we liked, to figure out our style as a couple, what he hated and what I liked or hated. We thought we were getting so particular that we were going to have to just build. We thought that everything we thought we wanted couldn’t be found so we just needed to have someone design it for us. Not true. When we came to see this house it just fit everything. It was a blank enough slate, it didn’t have a ton of character, which his great for curb appeal, but it had enough of a blank slate that we could put our own thing into it, our own impact. It met all the criteria. We could make it our own.
We have a lot of dreams for it. It’s coming up on 2 years and we’re 3/4 of the way through the house and the dreams are getting bigger. It doesn’t sound like there will ever be a completion date, it’ll never be done. We have dreams of doing a carriage house. One of the reasons we want to do it is because we love entertaining, we love having people here, and the house isn’t big enough for even half of her family to come visit. We could rent it out and I get to have that entertaining Airbnb kind of thing and then I’d be able to block it off for the times that I get to have family and friends come in. We think it’d be fun.”
