Welcome to the official website of A House We Built. We are a husband and wife team who designed our forever home from scratch together. Now that our house is built and we are moved in, we still have a lot of work to do styling, decorating, and continuing building projects we’re currently working on around our house not only to complete it but also to turn it from a house we designed into our forever family home.
To give a little background on us – we are high school sweetheart millennials. We got married in our early twenties and have always been working towards a common goal we shared of designing and building a home together. Originally, we weren’t sure if we were going to build or buy but we knew that a house and a place to put down roots was something we both wanted. So, for many years, we literally just worked hard as we could while saving as much as possible and spending very little. We never bought anything fancy, didn’t go on any expensive vacations, rarely ate at restaurants, and generally just lived extremely simply. So, for us building this house has been the result of years and years of hard work and saving. And we loved those years! It wasn’t a sacrifice. To us, it was working towards a goal. And when we were finally ready to start on our home project, we did a ton of research and decided that building a house made the most sense for us because it allowed us to truly design every inch of our home from scratch.
We designed this house from scratch together in 2016, we then broke ground the following summer, moved in the summer after that, and are now working hard on projects that make our house into a home. (We also work from home so this house functions as both our family home as well as our office space.)
Our house design is admittedly weird compared to more ‘normal’ houses. We created a tall, 4-story design because we decided to build “up” rather than “out”. This gave us the space we needed while keeping a smaller foot print and making a more minimal impact on the forest and local wildlife around us. We broke many traditional ‘rules’ in our design but our house is a very true reflection of us personally since we designed it around our specific needs and preferences. If I were to ever give one piece of advice regarding designing a home it would be that (unless you’re intentionally building to sell the house, which we are not), then always design what YOU love, not what you think other people will love.
Currently most major construction projects (like building walls, electrical, plumbing, etc) in our house are complete but we’re still doing a lot of ‘cosmetic construction’ and also decorating, making furniture, built-ins, artwork, etc make our styling personalized in a way that is a true reflection of us and what we love. Our “To Do List” has dozens of projects we want to complete around our house both inside and outside! We have at least 2-3 projects (ranging from small to very large) for every single room in our house – including some spaces that we have never yet shared! Honestly, if we ever got to the point where the house was truly ‘done’, I think we’d be sad lol. There’s something incredibly satisfying about designing, building, styling and decorating your home. We like to think of it as the ultimate creative nesting journey!
On a daily basis, we are most active on our Instagram page (@ahousewebuilt) where you can follow the latest daily updates we share on our whole house building, styling, and decorating journey.
All the sources for everything in our house and that you see on Instagram are always on our homepage or on the specific room pages that you can navigate to by the menu bar or via our website roadmap.
Our Tutorials section is where we share how-to guides on projects we’ve done.
Our Recipes section is where we share many of our favorite foods. We love to cook!
We have 5 rescue cats we adopted (2 sets of bonded siblings, one duo and one trio) that rule our house and we share lots of cat-related tips in our Cat section.
While we are happy to answer most questions, please do read our homepage first as it is very informative and most of the time the questions we get asked are already answered there.
And don’t forget to follow our Instagram page (@ahousewebuilt) to keep up with our daily progress!!