2007: We Build A House!

In 2005, we purchased five acres of land near Northfield, Minnesota and in 2007 we worked with architect Tod Drescher, carpenter/site manager Mark Ruebl, and an excellent team of workers to build a new house there. These web pages describe why we decided to build a house, with a journal of the process in words and pictures.

I acted as the general contractor for the project (with much help from Tod and Mark), managing all of the finances, while continuing to do my regular full-time job. That's not an easy thing to do and you should think carefully before doing it, but if you have a great building team it can be done.

You have to make ten thousand decisions when you build a house, and there are ten thousand potential pitfalls (but we did not encounter any major ones). Overall, we enjoyed the process and we are certainly enjoying our house! The following pages show why and how we did it.

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