About Patience and Determination
We started building our dream home in 2020. If you remember what 2020 was like, you can probably guess how smoothly that went.
COVID lockdowns. Material shortages and prices that climbed by the month. A construction schedule that seemed to rewrite itself weekly. And then the rain came — a lot of it, at all the wrong times.
The rain season of 2021 - 2022
Here's the thing about building a house: everything happens in sequence. If one piece is late, everything behind it waits. Our windows — all custom — went from a three-month lead time to twenty weeks. No windows and doors meant no interior carpentry, which meant a lot of standing around in the mud, recalculating.
We could have made it easier on ourselves. A standard design, standard materials, whatever was in stock. But we knew what we wanted this home to feel like: warm, quiet, unique, and built to last. That meant custom everything, and custom means decisions — hundreds of them, often made on the spot when a material suddenly wasn't available and we had to find something we loved just as much.
The mud during the window install
Inside, we kept everything soft and warm: off-white and warm grey, white oak, dark granite countertops, natural materials and fabrics throughout. Outside, we went bold — yakisugi, a traditional burned-wood siding with rich charcoal tones that shift with the sunlight. (It's also naturally fire-, pest-, and UV-resistant, which matters here.) Add the asymmetrical gable roof, and the house became exactly what we'd hoped for: a quiet sanctuary inside, something you've never quite seen before outside.
Warm and bright interior
Our “non-negotiable” item on the material schedule was Yakisugi siding
We won't pretend we weathered every setback gracefully. There was plenty of frustration, and more than one moment of wondering if we should have just picked the easy path. But standing in this house now, we're glad we didn't. The joy of being in this space feels earned — and maybe that's why it feels like home
