We are so very excited to enter our home in Durango, Colorado, as this project has been a very long road to completion.  We started this home in September 2011 hoping we would be “finished” a year later, how wrong we were.  Neither of us are architects or builders by profession, nor have we ever built a home before this endeavor, but it has always been a dream of ours to do this. It may have been a little crazy, but we took the opportunity to do it all, partially because we wanted to experience it all, but mostly because we quickly realized that to be able to afford our dream we would have to do most of the work ourselves. We designed the building, poured the foundation, and raised the SIP panel walls and roof. We did all of the interior finish work including building the cabinets and through it all we turned to Fine Home Building Magazine and Taunton Press to help us along the way.

Our design process was long and circuitous. After a year of design work we had a complete set of plans for an entirely different house. Two months before construction was supposed to begin while sitting on a rock in the middle of the building lot we realized it was not the right design for us or for the property. Back to the drawing board we went. We started from scratch and just one month before construction was to commence we completed plans for exactly what we dreamed of and more suited for the property. To inform us on decisions of form, materials and details we looked at elements of beautiful farmhouses and barns in Vermont, older Victorian homes around Durango and mining structures found around Southwest Colorado. We wanted our house to look like it might have lived in the neighborhood for many years, and that it grew organically over time which helped us to decide on the attached barn format.

Inside the house we strived to give each room character with wall treatments, crown moulding and built-in storage. In the great room we built a ship ladder using the same reclaimed Doug Fir found throughout the house and we used left over cherry flooring to build a large farm table for the kitchen.   

Be felt the best path to sustainabilit was to create a home that we will love for a very long time and a home that hopefully future generations will love.  That is really the essence of what we wanted to achieve with out project.