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. We’d built a home before in a planned community, where we picked out all the finishes ourselves. Except some of those finishes turned out wrong. The soffit and fascia on the outside of the house came out the wrong color, and getting that fixed turned into a real battle. On top of that, we were trying to time the sale of our old home around when the new one would be finished. We asked the contractor over and over when it would actually be done. Then the house failed its Certificate of Occupancy inspection, and we ended up living in an Airbnb for a month before we could move in.
So yes. We were nervous about doing this again.
For years we debated. Planned. Doubted 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.
We only made it out to the site three times during the entire build. Three. The rest of the time, we relied on a neighbor who took photos every week and sent them to us so we could see what was actually happening. Without him, I think we would have lost our minds.
The build started in September and finished the following May. Our contractor this time was fantastic, which after the last experience felt almost suspicious. We kept waiting for something to go wrong. It never did, at least not in any way that mattered.
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 about the same as a small island nation?
The biggest lesson? Every decision looks different once you’re living in the house.
We’ve only been here a few months, 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.
And then there’s the furniture. When we moved in, all of our old furniture went into the walkout basement, except for the bedroom set. That meant the entire upstairs, our main living space, sat completely empty. No couch. No rugs. Nothing. It echoed. For a couple of months, we watched TV sitting in two leather chairs in the middle of an otherwise bare room, and I’m honestly not sure how we didn’t go crazy.
Then, piece by piece, furniture started showing up. First the area rugs. Then the leather chairs and the counter stools for the kitchen. Then the dining table. The couch didn’t arrive until three months after we’d moved in, which meant three months of that echo before the room finally started to sound like a home. I still haven’t picked out lamps for the living room. I’m waiting to find the right ones, however long that takes.
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.
