Almost Three Years in the Making: Part Two

When I left this story in Part One, we'd spent months shaping the floor plan, working through the interiors and documenting the details of this new home.

Then came the part where all of that planning had to become something buildable.

Finding the right builder

Like most projects of this scale, the journey wasn't perfectly linear.

There were builders, pricing, availability and timeframes to work through. The clients had a builder they really wanted to work with, but for a while, it didn't look as though the timing was going to align.

Eventually, it did.

The builder they had hoped for became available, construction began, and something we'd spent so long looking at through floor plans, elevations, schedules and samples started becoming real.

My involvement didn't stop once the drawings were issued.

Throughout construction there were questions to answer, details to clarify and conversations with the builder as things progressed on site.

That's a part of this project that probably won't ever be obvious in the finished photographs.

You won't see the email that clarified a detail. You won't know which decisions were revisited during construction or how many conversations happened before something was installed.

But I remember them.

And now, after all of that, they're home.

This one feels a little different

I've been thinking about why I've felt so emotional about this project reaching completion.

Of course I'm excited to see the finished home. There are details I've been waiting years to see built.

But I think it's more than that.

When you work alongside people for this length of time, you remember everything that came before the finished photographs.

I remember those early conversations in 2023. I remember working through the floor plan. I remember the selections, the changes, the questions and all the little decisions that needed an answer before the next thing could happen.

And I know there was another side to that journey for my clients—the waiting, decision-making, quoting, construction and anticipation of finally being able to move into the home they'd spent years planning.

A few weeks ago, they did.

They're now waking up in the rooms we once moved around on a floor plan. They're using the spaces we talked through over and over again. Their family is living within a home that, for such a long time, existed only in drawings, samples and conversations.

The samples we held in our hands are now floors, cabinetry and walls around them.

That's a pretty special thing to see.

For me personally, there's another layer to it too.

These clients trusted me with their new home at a relatively early point in my business. They trusted my experience and my ability to take an enormous number of ideas and decisions and turn them into something clear enough to design, document, price and eventually build.

I'll always be grateful for that trust.

There's far too much to this project to fit into these two stories—and I don't really want to try.

Over the coming months, I'm going to share it gradually. The floor plan, the interiors, some of the decisions behind individual spaces, the documentation, the details and, of course, plenty more of the completed home.

For now, though, I'm simply enjoying being able to say something I've been waiting almost three years to say.

They're home.

The samples we held in our hands are now floors, cabinetry and walls around them.

That's a pretty special thing to see.