(Part 2 of our Adirondack story)
There’s a moment when a dream stops being hypothetical and suddenly becomes possible.
For us, that moment arrived in the form of a simple work announcement.
But before that happened, the idea of building our Adirondack home had already been shelved.
When the Plan Went on Hold
When we left the Adirondacks after that month-long stay during COVID, we returned home with mixed emotions.
On one hand, we had done something pretty exciting — we bought land in the Adirondacks.
On the other hand, building anything on that land suddenly seemed unrealistic.
Construction prices had gone completely crazy during COVID. Lumber alone had skyrocketed to around $1000 per thousand board feet, and the estimates we received for even a modest cabin were far beyond what we had expected.
We had talked with several builders, but most never even responded. One builder who did was Dan from Vincent Family Construction, who was great about answering questions and discussing possibilities.
But the numbers simply didn’t make sense.
So I sent Dan an email explaining that we were going to hit pause on the project for a while.
The land would sit there, waiting for some future time when building made more sense.
At that point the plan was simple: maybe someday it would become a vacation home.
Life Slowly Returned to Normal
As time passed, the world slowly started returning to something resembling normal.
COVID faded from daily headlines. People went back to offices. Travel resumed. Construction supply chains slowly began stabilizing.
The Adirondack land remained something we talked about occasionally.
“Someday we should build up there.”
But it wasn’t something we were actively pursuing anymore.
At least not yet.
The Announcement That Changed Everything
Then one day something unexpected happened.
My company announced that my position would become fully remote going forward.
Not temporarily.
Permanently.
That single announcement completely changed the equation.
Suddenly the Adirondacks weren’t just a place we could visit occasionally.
They were a place we could actually live.
Instead of building a small vacation cabin someday, we started imagining something different:
What if we built our full-time home there instead?
Revisiting the Dream
Once that idea took hold, it was hard to ignore.
We already owned the land. We already knew we loved the area. And now the biggest barrier — being tied to an office — had disappeared.
So we started revisiting the idea of building again.
But this time the conversation was different.
Instead of asking:
“Could we build a small vacation place someday?”
We were asking:
“What would it take to actually live here?”
That meant thinking about things we hadn’t considered before:
- year-round access
- reliable internet
- winter living
- heating
- space for a home office
It also meant revisiting builders.
And once again, one of the first people we contacted was Dan from Vincent Family Construction.
Fortunately, he remembered us.
And this time the conversation went a lot further.
The Dream Becomes a Plan
With remote work making the move possible, the project that had been sitting on pause suddenly started moving forward again.
We began working through the process of designing the house, figuring out logistics, and preparing the property for construction.
What started as a simple idea during a one-month Airbnb stay had slowly evolved into something much bigger.
We were finally going to build our Adirondack home.
But as we soon discovered, building a home in the mountains comes with its own set of challenges — from site work to logistics to weather.
And the real adventure was just getting started.
