We're Building a House!

Dear Loved One,

I have been in my own crazy little world these last two years since Anna (baby no. 6) came along, especially since it also happened to be right after Eden moved out to join Jordan at college. Life has been so much more demanding having little ones again, and we've also had big house projects, as usual. So, instead of barely communicating with anyone about what's going on in our life, I thought maybe I could start sharing about it a bit - and I'd love to hear more about what's going on in your life as well!

At our niece's wedding over Memorial Day weekend 2024

Two and a half years ago, we moved out of the village house where we homesteaded for 8 years to embark on a new house project 20 minutes north. This "new" house is a Colonial built in 1780, set on several more acres, and it happened to come with a buildable 3 acre lot right across the road. So after renovating the main house last summer, we started making plans to build a house for the first time on the empty lot.

Our preliminary plan for house (yellow), septic (orange), and driveway (red), though it's totally different now!

After looking at many different options, I decided that I really wanted to build this house as a test to see how affordably, beautifully, and naturally one could build a house in Massachusetts in 2024. In a future post, I'll share the details of how we chose the kit house* (all assembly required!) that we did. As we trudged through the planning process last fall, we were thinking that we'd hire some carpenters we'd used in the past to help us build it. But as word spread at St. John's College, where our daughters go to school, about our upcoming building project, a new idea emerged: we could have some interested college students live with us over the summer and help us to build it!

Fast forward to today: we've got 11 people living in our house (our family of 8 + 3 college friends), and after a visit to the 83-year-old owner/architect in New Hampshire, pouring over our 100 pages of building details, plus discovering that our foundation size was off and many dimensions needed to be recalculated, we started building in earnest last week.

Lively meals around our 200-year-old dining table

Of course, not everyone is actually building: Mickey has his full-time job, Jordan is in charge of feeding us all, and others of us rotate childcare, house chores, store runs ... and then I'm still wrapping up my homeschooling year with Leah and Judah. It's a busy beehive up on this hill!

Baby and I check on the guys' work

Until next time!

xo,

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