House of Hyperbole

Hello!

Uh, you may have noticed that I took all the old posts down. That’s because we don’t live there no mo’. We’re embarking on a brand-new, even-more-terrifying adventure: Building our dream home!

A few years ago I got a massive bee in my bonnet about getting out of the city. We started saving to move elsewhere, and I started referring to our house savings account as GUTFOOB: Get Us The Fuck Out Of Baltimore. After nearly nine years in the city—nine years that included both a car break-in AND a home break-in—I’d really had enough. It wasn’t Baltimore specifically, I’m just not a city gal. You can keep your amenities… being “close to the action” doesn’t do it for me. I need nature and the single tree in our backyard wasn’t cutting it. Plus, while we were only about six miles from downtown, it still took half an hour to get anywhere. (Ask me if I miss city traffic.)

In addition to being sick of city life, I scored a pretty sweet work-from-home gig. Mike was already working from home, so we were free to move anywhere we wanted. And the housing market was hot in favor of sellers, so we knew we’d make enough money on our sale to get a great head start on building. The timing really couldn’t have been better.

Mike and I have been talking about building our own house for what feels like eons. Every day in our old house inspired a new thought of, “I really wish this room were bigger,” or “I’d love to not have to walk up and down two flights of stairs to do laundry,” and “Wouldn’t it be great to have two sinks in the master bathroom?” But the thought of building a house felt so unattainable. How much will that cost? It sounds hella expensive. How does it even work? Where do we start? There are so many moving parts.

Having seen many friends and family members go through some significant home-building trauma, I started looking into the least melodramatic ways to make it happen. The first thing I set my mind to was living on the property while we build. That way, we weren’t on anyone’s timetable but our own. We’d never have to rent back our first house, live in a hotel, crash with family, or pay two mortgages at once. Unfortunately, that drastically limited our options in terms of available, affordable property.

Another thing limiting our options was location. Oh, and lot size. (Apparently I’m picky and like a challenge.) We wanted something between three and five acres within an hour of Penn State so we can go to more games and just visit more often. Property within an hour proved to be either whole-ass farms or postage-stamp lots in the ‘burbs, so we expanded our radius to an hour and a half. After months of scouring listings and monitoring Zillow alerts, we hit the jackpot…

…a mobile home that sits on 3.7 acres in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania!

Bet you didn’t expect me to be this stoked to move into a trailer that was built in 1972, but here I am. Honestly, we were looking for anything small enough to be knocked down later if we needed to. The property setup is perfect. The lot is bisected by a road, with the mobile home sitting on 0.6 acres and the build site being on 3.1 wooded acres that BACK UP TO A CREEK. I have dreamed about a property like this my entire life. So two years in a trailer seems like a pretty small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.

We ended up putting in an offer on the trailer the same day we toured it. From offer to closing, it took us about a month and a half. In that time, we were able to sell our Baltimore house and get settled into our new digs in mid-August of 2021. And that’s when the real fun began.