Breaking Ground on Our Intentional Custom Home Build at Five Trails
After 18 Months of Dreaming, Designing, and Walking the Land, We Finally Begin
Next week, we officially break ground on our intentional custom home build at Five Trails, and even writing those words feels surreal. For the past 18 months, this home has existed mostly as an idea we carried with us through conversations, sketches, floor plans, late-night design decisions, and countless walks across the property imagining what life here might eventually become. This weekend, seeing the land fully staked for excavation changed something. For the first time, we could physically stand inside spaces that until now had only existed in our minds. The outline of the kitchen. The placement of the porch. The windows facing the trees. The flow of rooms designed around the way we actually want to live. Learn more about the Five Trails story here.
There is something deeply emotional about watching an intentional custom home build move from imagination into reality. For so long, Five Trails has been less about constructing a house and more about thoughtfully creating the setting for our next chapter of life.
Why This Intentional Custom Home Build Feels Different
One of the things I’ve realized throughout this process is that an intentional custom home build asks different questions than a typical home project. It forces you to think carefully about how you want your days to feel, not just how you want your spaces to look. Every decision becomes less about checking boxes and more about creating a home that supports your rhythms, values, relationships, and routines.
As empty nesters entering a new season of life, we found ourselves designing less around obligation and more around intention. We wanted a home that feels peaceful after long workweeks, welcoming when our kids come home from college, and connected to the land surrounding it. We wanted spaces that encourage gathering without feeling overwhelming and rooms that feel warm, layered, functional, and calm.
That mindset has shaped every aspect of this intentional custom home build from the very beginning.
Designing a Home Around Real Life
The longer we spent planning Five Trails, the more we realized that intentional home design is really about honesty. It requires you to stop designing around aspiration and start designing around truth. How do we actually live? What routines matter most to us? What spaces make us feel connected, rested, creative, or grounded?
For us, the answers always came back to the same themes: simplicity, warmth, connection, and functionality.
That’s why this intentional custom home build includes a large working kitchen designed for real cooking and gathering, oversized windows that frame the property instead of competing with it, and spaces intentionally designed to feel open without feeling cavernous. We focused heavily on natural textures, warm woods, layered lighting, modern heritage details, and practical storage solutions that support everyday life without creating visual clutter.
More than anything, we wanted this home to feel deeply lived in from the beginning. Not perfect. Not overly polished. Just thoughtful, welcoming, and connected to the way we truly want to spend our time.
Letting the Land Shape the Home
One of the most meaningful parts of this intentional custom home build has been allowing the land itself to guide so many of our decisions. Long before we finalized finishes or selected materials, we spent time simply walking the 5+ acres of the property. We paid attention to where the light falls in the morning, how the trees frame certain views, and how the home could sit naturally within the landscape instead of overpowering it.
Five Trails has always been about creating harmony between the home and the land around it. That intention has influenced everything from the orientation of the windows to the outdoor living spaces to the overall tone and scale of the design itself. We wanted the property to remain the focal point. The house should support the beauty of the land, not compete with it.
That philosophy has become one of the defining elements of this entire intentional custom home build.
The Emotional Reality of Building in Midlife
What surprises me most about this season is how emotional it feels to build a home at this stage of life. There is excitement, certainly, but there is also vulnerability in creating something so intentional. Building a home in midlife feels less like starting over and more like refining what matters most.
This process has held equal parts anticipation and uncertainty. There will absolutely be delays, difficult decisions, budget conversations, moments of exhaustion, and probably a few days where we question our own sanity. But beneath all of that is a strong sense that this intentional custom home build reflects who we are becoming as much as where we are going.
The older I get, the more I value spaces that create peace instead of noise. Spaces that invite conversation, rest, connection, and presence. Five Trails has always represented that vision for us.
Standing Inside the Future
This weekend, standing on the staked lot, I realized I could finally see more than the structure itself. I could picture the life unfolding around it. Morning coffee on the porch. Dogs running the trails. Quiet evenings after long workdays. Kids home for the holidays. Friends gathered around the kitchen island long after dinner ends. The kind of ordinary moments that slowly become the heartbeat of a home.
After 18 months of dreaming, our intentional custom home build officially begins next week. Seeing those wooden stakes in the ground really solidified that this was never only about building a house.
It was always about building a life that feels deeply aligned with the season we’re living now.
