Our New House

Here is where we’ll document the construction of our new house.

To give you some background about why we’re doing this, we have been wanting more space for a while. Our house doesn’t have a garage and we pretty much filled it up when we moved in. After Alison and then Adam joined us, we really started running out of room.

For about a year we were casually visiting open houses in neighborhoods we liked. We visited one house and it was the first one we fell in love with. It was the only one we could actually see ourselves living in, but we weren’t ready to move yet. We started talking to the realtor running the open house and kept in touch with her over the next several months. Finally she asked us if we might be interested in building our own house.

We hadn’t considered it before that point, but once we started thinking about it, we liked the idea. Many of the newer houses we had seen were designed in a way that didn’t fit our lifestyle, with huge bedrooms and smaller living spaces. The house we liked so much had smaller bedrooms, larger living spaces, and an open floor plan, all of which was just what we were looking for. We met with the house’s designer and builder and after seeing examples of their work and checking their references, decided to take the plunge!

The hardest part was finding a property to build on. In the Silicon Valley there are very few empty lots; instead, if you want to build, you need to buy an older, smaller house in poor condition and tear it down. There are houses like that available, but we were very specific about the kind of neighborhood we wanted to live in. In our current neighborhood we can easily walk to a grocery store, a drugstore, a park, a school, a couple of bakeries, and several restaurants, and we wanted the same flexibility in our new house. Our realtor found the perfect neighborhood in the next town over from ours, and luckily several houses came up for sale right when we were looking. We were outbid on one property, and in August 2008 we were able to buy our current property.

After several months of delays, we finally have our building permit!