Well, I'll save the very beginning for another day. What I'm itching to talk about is this place where I am right now. For some crazy reason, Morgan (my husband) and I decided it was a good idea to build a house from scratch. It was last December right before Christmas when it happened. A friend was selling a parcel of land that we had eyed about six months before, it's in town, but it feels like the country. A sunny open meadow edged by towering Ponderosa pines and Cottonwoods with Rattlesnake creek noisily babbling by. A trail that leads to a park with ice skating in the winter and tennis in summer. A wild wood with owls and woodpeckers, little native squirrels, lots of bears and probably the occasional mountain lion. A finger of wilderness reaching down almost poking the heart of our small city.

So I'm a romantic and sometimes nostalgic. I grew up with a few abandoned overgrown acres behind my house in the Boston suburb of Dedham, Massachussestts, and while the most dangerous wild animals were the shockingly large raccoons, that patch of untamed land was a haven for my siblings and I, where we built forts for hours and didn't come home 'til the dinner bell rang, an actual bell mounted by our back door. So you can see I was a hopeless case … despite having a perfectly nice life and house in a great school district, we had to buy this lot by the woods where I imagined our children living in semi-feral bliss.

Now, here we are, foundation poured ready to dive in head first. I am excited and grateful for this opportunity, despite teetering on the edge of financial ruin. I hope my kids will be grateful too and not remember it as the time mom and dad built a house and we barely saw them for a year and when we did they yelled at us a lot and it scarred us permanently. I gotta admit, last December I thought it would be easy, no big deal … true confession: It is part of my disposition; I waffle constantly between over confidence and total lack there of, depending on the day. It has already been a long road to get where we are today. Some of it I will go back and touch on, some of it is better left in the past. Here's what it has looked like since mid-August:

Early September - Getting ready for concrete. Deer looking confused. — Early September - Getting ready for concrete. Deer looking confused.

Late September - Pardon my french but, the garage is really f***ing small. So much for measure twice.

Late September - Blue foam goes down. This will keep us from heating the earth.