Here starts the journey

We are taking the biggest step one takes - building a new home. Or, at least, that's the plan. My hope is that in this blog, I will chronicle the selling of our home, the planning of our new home, the building of that new home, and our eventual habitation of that home.

For the past ten years, we have called Williston, Vermont our home town, and our house on North Brownell our home. We have done a lot here. We became real, actual homeowners here. We raised our daughter here. We conceived and had our twins boys here (well, OK, they were not born here, but near by). We've had a half-dozen cars here. We've had three cats and two birds here.

We've changed the house a lot over those years. My office became the babies' room, then Brittany's room. Brittany's room became the boys' room. The living room became the family room. The family room became the dining room. The dining room became the family room extension. The deck was dismantled and was replaced with a sun room and a bigger deck. The basement was finished. The only rooms that never changed much were the kitchen, the master bedroom (which we never even painted), and the bathrooms.

This house could be our home for a long time. But we have found that there are too many things lacking that we want. More than anything else, we want a neighborhood.

That's not to say we don't have good neighbors, because we do. To our left are the McManns, an older couple with a hulking dog as their pet and child. To our right are the Normands, a younger couple who live in a sibling home. What's missing? Kids. Our kids have no kids to play with. The friends our kids did have in a neighborhood across the street from us moved away. Though the town ripped the paved sidewalk and replaced it with a concrete sidewalk, the road is still too busy to allow us to comfortably allow the kids to cross the street by themselves.

So when we found a few undeveloped lots in a neighborhood nearby, and a sign with a number to call, we started thinking that it might be time to move, if the price was right. The cost of a new house would have to be low enough, and the price we could get for our house would have to be high enough, to make it fit in a budget.

So now, we have put down a deposit on a piece of land, we have an agent to sell our house, and a builder to build our new house. I'll put pictures of our bit of land here, copies of our plans, and if all works out, photos of our house as it grows from a muddy place to a hole in the ground to a concrete pit to a shell of a house to a home.