By February of this year we were in full-on planning mode. Our one-day neighbor, an architect, worked with me to draw up rough plans and we would hire a designer to do all the CAD drawings. We set to work meeting for lunches and late dinners over piles of onion skin sketches, discarded ideas crumpled and spreading out over the floor. This is the fun part, when the ideas are untethered by budgets and you are still blissfully ignorant of the stress cloud looming over ready to pour down with the first shovelful of earth.