Storybook Hill Series | Part 1 The day I found the house that would ultimately change the course of my life.
I think for years I thought manifestation meant wanting something badly enough.
Visualizing it.
Scripting it.
Making a Pinterest board about it.
Convincing yourself it was already yours while quietly refreshing your bank account and spiraling.
But the older I get, the more I think manifestation has a lot less to do with obsession and a lot more to do with alignment. With becoming. With slowly building a life your nervous system can actually hold.
Looking back now, I don’t think I was manifesting a house at all.
I was manifesting a feeling and I just didn’t know it yet.
What I wanted wasn’t square footage.
It wasn’t acreage.
It wasn’t even the house itself.
It was peace.
Roots.
Legacy.
Space.
A life that felt slower, softer, and more like home.
The house just happened to be the vehicle that got me there.
Dale and I bought our little farmette in 2015 with wildly delusional aspirations and approximately fourteen dollars to our name. We loved the land immediately. Rolling hills. Big skies. Room to breathe. It felt peaceful in a way neither of us could fully explain.
The house itself, however, was another story.
It was an old farmhouse built in 1900 with a stone foundation and all the charm and structural confusion that comes with that. Somewhere around the year 2000, someone had “remodeled” it in a way that can only be described as aggressively oak. Thick banisters. Crooked doors. Odd transitions. Tiny rooms. Nothing square. Nothing level. Nothing normal.
As my extremely talented and wildly patient husband got deeper into projects over the years, we slowly realized the house was essentially being held together by optimism and old wood.
The floors dipped.
The walls leaned.
The bathrooms required stepping up and down like an agility course.
The windows leaked.
The kitchen needed work.
The outdoor spaces needed work.
Everything needed work.
And as we got older and finally started putting a little money in the bank, we realized we were approaching the point where we either needed to:
A. pour a fortune into the house we had
or
B. tear it down and build our dream home.
We chose option B.
Or at least we thought we did.
We Thought We Were Going to Build
For a while, I became completely consumed by the idea of building. It sounds so fun, in theory. I immediately threw myself into the project because apparently I cannot experience a single life event without turning it into either content or a business opportunity.
I scoured Pinterest searching for the perfect house plan. Every time I found one, I’d feel settled for about fifteen minutes before Facebook served up an even better option because the algorithm had clearly become personally invested in my future build.
Soon I had entire boards dedicated to kitchens, porches, mudrooms, and dream primary bathrooms. I built color coded budget spreadsheets. Started a blog. Started a newsletter. Created freebies. At one point I was genuinely trying to figure out how affiliate marketing might somehow fund the entire project.
In other words, I was doing what I always do when I get excited about something.
I wasn’t just planning it; I was building an entire ecosystem around it.
This is where being a scanner personality becomes both a gift and a liability. Give me a new idea and I won’t just research it. I’ll start a spreadsheet, create a brand, buy a domain name, map out three revenue streams, and begin mentally accepting speaking engagements before lunch.
One of the lesser-discussed side effects of being a scanner personality is that we don’t casually explore interests. We immediately become founding members, lead researchers, marketing directors, and unofficial historians of whatever has captured our attention.
For years, I thought this tendency meant I was unfocused. Now I realize it’s just how I’m wired. When something captures my imagination, I don’t dip a toe in, I build an entire world around it and then move in.
This build was no different.
When the Dream Started Feeling Wrong
Meanwhile, we met with Dale’s cousin, who happens to be an incredibly talented builder. Craftsmanship is just a genetic trait in his family.
We walked him through our vision.
The tear down.
The rebuild.
The forever home.
And I remember watching his expression shift ever so slightly as we talked. Not dramatically, but just enough to communicate that he understood something we didn’t yet.
At the time, I was imagining beautiful finished spaces and dream-home possibilities. He and Dale were imagining permits, timelines, budgets, decisions, delays, and approximately ten thousand details I’d never considered.
They knew exactly what we were signing up for. The problem was that I was starting to realize I didn’t want to sign up for it.
On Pinterest, building a house looks so exciting.
In reality, every conversation about building left me feeling slightly nauseous.
Not because anything was wrong; we hadn’t even begun the process yet. Nobody was asking me to choose countertops or cabinet hardware. We hadn’t reached the point of comparing seventeen shades of white or debating the merits of one faucet over another.
But I knew those decisions were coming and the more I thought about them, the more I found myself pulling away instead of leaning in.
Because here’s what nobody tells you about building your dream house: at some point you realize you’re responsible for creating every single detail of it. That’s just too much pressure for me.
Dale can look at a blueprint and see possibility. I look at a blueprint and see seventeen thousand irreversible decisions.
Maybe part of that came from watching my parents build houses when I was growing up. I don’t remember the floor plans nearly as much as I remember the tension. The stress. The emotional weight of trying to create the perfect thing while real life continued happening underneath it.
And somewhere in the middle of all those conversations, I started noticing something uncomfortable.
I wasn’t excited by the blank slate.
I was intimidated by it.
Starting from scratch has never really been my gift.
I Prefer Refinement to Reinvention
I’ve never been particularly drawn to blank slates.
Give me something with good bones. Something with history. Something imperfect but full of potential.
I like bringing things back to life.
Layering.
Editing.
Tweaking.
Improving.
Seeing what something can become.
And if something turns out weird, I can confidently blame the original owner instead of staring into the abyss of my own decision-making. Which is funny, but also probably explains my entire philosophy on business, relationships, creativity, and life.
Around here, we have a saying: “It just needs a little lipstick.” It’s become shorthand for almost everything I love. An old building. An existing business. A tired room. A half-baked idea.
I don’t see things for what they are. I see them for what they could become, which is probably why the idea of building from scratch felt so uncomfortable.
No good bones to uncover.
No history to preserve.
No story to continue.
Just a blank page waiting for me to get everything right.
And well, that’s just too much freaking pressure for me.
The problem was that somewhere along the way, I had stopped seeing our farmhouse as a collection of possibilities and started seeing it as a collection of problems.
Not because it was a bad house.
It wasn’t.
We were raising our two amazing kids there.
Dreamed up and built businesses there.
Hosted friends and family there.
Celebrated and grieved there.
Created a decade of memories there.
I loved that property. I still do.
I was just tired.
And there’s a difference.
Tired of the crooked floors.
Tired of the windows.
Tired of the endless list of things that needed attention.
Tired of spending every spare dollar and weekend trying to convince myself we were one project away from finished.
Because that’s the thing about old houses.
You’re never finished.
There’s always another project waiting patiently around the corner…usually tapping a pen against the clipboard.
One afternoon I was sitting in my office wrestling with a broken window crank for what felt like the hundredth time when something inside me finally gave way.
It wasn’t really about the window; it was about the ten years of little things.
Ten years of patching and fixing and adjusting and making do.
Ten years of telling myself we’d get to it eventually.
I sat there staring at that stupid window and suddenly felt tears welling up.
Not because I couldn’t fix it; because I didn’t want to.
So I marched downstairs, across the yard, and over to where Dale was innocently working with his wood. Totally mature sentence. Totally innocent context. He’s an incredibly talented woodworker, which means wood jokes are basically unavoidable in our marriage.
I stood there with my hands on my hips, tears in my eyes, and said: “We have to do something about this house. I cannot live like this anymore.”
Very dramatic.
Slightly hormonal.
Completely over the broken window.
You get the idea.
And without even looking up, he said: “Go look for something then.”
I swear to you, that possibility had never occurred to me.
Not seriously.
We’d talked about building.
We’d talked about remodeling.
We’d talked about tearing the whole thing down and starting over.
But selling? Moving? Buying something else? That wasn’t part of the plan…at least not the plan I’d been carrying around in my head.
Poor Dale.
In hindsight, “Go look for something then” should probably be added to the list of famous last words.
We’ve been married for twenty years, so he knows how determined I can be when I get a scent. What I don’t think he realized was that he had just unleashed a level of focus usually reserved for Olympic athletes, private investigators, and mildly unhinged women on Zillow.
Neither of us had any idea what was about to happen next.
The second those words left his mouth, I turned around, marched across the yard, up the stairs, opened Zillow, and there it was.
A two million dollar house.
Four miles away.
Thirty eight acres.
Three outbuildings.
And somehow, impossibly, the exact kind of home I didn’t know I had secretly loved for years sitting right there on the homepage of my feed like the universe itself had gotten a little too specific.
My house.
I stared at the listing for a long time.
Not in a “we should buy this” kind of way.
More in a: “Oh, hello. There you are.” Kind of way.
Like something in me recognized it before my brain had time to explain it.
At the time, I thought I’d found a house.
Looking back now, I can see I had stumbled into an entirely different chapter of my life.
This is part of an ongoing series documenting the journey to our dream home and the unexpected lessons that came with it.
Continue to Part 2 | Manifesting a Dream House: When I Knew Storybook Hill Was Ours →
