Building our House

It all started with some chickens. My son had always wanted them, and in a Randy Pausch moment, I relented. What could go wrong? About a year passed, and our brood grew to six chickens (give or take -- chickens are subject to all sorts of natural predators, even in one's own backyard, so the beak count was always fluctuating a bit). It was a family affair; chicks were raised, they'd run around the yard, they'd eat all sorts of bugs, and generally surprised me by each having distinct personalities. Once my wife Sharon called me in a panic, convinced she had fed the chicks food that was intended for full-grown chickens. The chicks were convulsing on the floor of the cage and Sharon was convinced she had somehow poisoned them. She was in tears, until I suggested that maybe the chicks were just dust-bathing. Sharon stopped crying. It was one of many teachable moments -- we were not raised on farms, so what did we know? The chicks were perfectly healthy and grew into fine chickens.

The beginning of this particular journey started when one of the chickens turned out to be a rooster. Roosters are loud. There was one particular episode where I was in my pajamas at three o'clock in the morning, on a cold January night, standing shirtless and shivering in the coop and yelling at the rooster to "just shut up already." The rooster cocked its head and stared at me, but did not shut up. Had I been raised on a farm, that might have been the end of the rooster, but he continued to crow proudly day after day, until we finally got a letter from our homeowners' association. The letter was polite but made it quite clear that section 3 of our HOA policies specifically prohibited the keeping of "poultry" in the neighborhood. I checked, and it was pretty clear to me too. We'd been ratted out, probably by some poor neighbor who had similar feelings towards our rooster as I.

Undeterred, my wife set about eliminating the problem -- not the rooster, but having an HOA. She began looking for land, where we could build a house and have chickens, dammit. We were going to become frontier people (although we decided to stay in the same school district). This is where our story begins.

In September of 2012, Sharon finally found the property: a five-acre horse "farm", with a small house, a barn, and some fencing. The land was in good shape, fairly flat, and plans were laid -- the house was solid but too small for a family with six kids, so we were going to have to expand it. We bought the property in December, hired an architect, hired a builder, and in the Summer of 2013, work began.

This will be the story of the building of our new home. One with chickens, and maybe a horse or two, and some room for the kids to run around, and, of course, a tractor for me (there had to be something in it for me).