Several years ago, my husband came home with a hat.
Not just any hat.
A hat with a bison on the front.
He looked at me and asked, “Do you know what this is?”
I stared at it.
“A buffalo?”
“No,” he said proudly. “It’s Wyoming’s state flag. I think this is where we’re going to move.”
Naturally, I assumed he’d lost his mind.
Fast forward a few years, and after visiting Yellowstone National Park and exploring the Big Horn Basin, we fell completely in love with Wyoming.
The wide-open spaces.
The mountains.
The wildlife.
The fact that traffic consists mostly of deer making questionable life decisions.
We knew we wanted to build there someday.
The problem was that we’d already had one bad building experience.
Back in 2020, we built with a developer and learned some expensive lessons.
Let’s just say it left us a little gun-shy about jumping into another construction project.
For years we debated.
Planned.
Second-guessed ourselves.
Planned some more.
Then eventually we decided if we were ever going to do it, now was the time.
What I didn’t expect was that we’d build an entire house while living over 1,500 miles away in Tennessee.
Apparently that’s a thing people do.
I still don’t fully understand how.
There were video calls.
Text messages.
Emails.
More emails.
And approximately 7,000 decisions.
Maybe more.
One area where I definitely lost count was doors.
The sales representative at Builders FirstSource deserves either a raise or a therapy session after dealing with me.
Possibly both.
I changed my mind so many times that I eventually stopped keeping track.
The biggest surprise?
Cabinets.
Who knew cabinets could cost approximately the same amount as a small island nation?
The biggest lesson?
Every decision looks different once you’re living in the house.
We’ve only been here about a month, and there are already things I’d change.
A different metal roof color.
A few finish choices.
We’re currently waiting for a door to be re-stained because it doesn’t quite match the garage doors.
But that’s the funny thing about building a custom home.
You spend years trying to make every decision perfect.
Then you move in and realize perfection was never really the goal.
Home was.
And every evening when I sit on our covered deck looking out at the Wyoming views we dreamed about for years, I remember exactly why we did it.
