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 started designing this house early 2016. That summer, we found a beautiful forested property we fell in love with and then purchased in the fall. We put in an insanely long driveway to our house site we chose to place in the middle of the woods. We broke ground Summer 2017, moved in Summer 2018, and are now making this house into a home. (Also because I get asked this a lot, we co-own a small business we both work from home – this house functions as both our family home as well as our office.)
Our house design is admittedly a little weird compared to most ‘normal’ houses. It’s a 4-story design because we decided to build “up” rather than “out” allowing the house to have a smaller footprint and make the smallest impact on the forest and local wildlife around us as possible. We broke a lot of traditional ‘rules’ in our design but if you were to get to know us you’d see that 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 planning to sell the house, which we are not) always design what YOU love, not what you think other people will love.
Currently our situation is that the main 3 floors of our house are considered ‘finished’ but we’re in the process of decorating and styling them as well as doing little build projects to enhance them. We’ve been building furniture and accent walls and all sorts of add-ons to make our styling as personalized as possible in a way that is a true reflection of us and what we love. We have a ‘house project’ to-do list with dozens of projects we want to complete around our house both inside and outside! And that doesn’t even count the biggest one which is DIY finishing our whole basement (about 2000sf) which we’re doing now! And more long-term, we have even more to do (like building a deck!) but honestly we find these projects fun learning experiences so to us having a lot to do is a good thing. 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, and decorating your home. We like to think of it as the ultimate 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!!