About six or seven weeks ago, some earth moving equipment started shaping the empty lot across the street from us. We live a block away from a light rail station, so density is definitely in our future, and this lot was inevitably going to host a home. It’s a bit shocking how quickly the house is going up, and somewhat disheartening.

I came home one day a few weeks ago and Morgan said, “did you see that they built their foundation forms today and will be pouring tomorrow?” It took us two months or something to build our footings and foundation forms. Now, to be fair, our situation is completely different, given that the land we are on required fancy footings with pin piles and that the foundation walls are also the walls of our new living space, but still. This week they slapped a roof on and started popping windows in, to Morgan’s great chagrin. They are, of course, doing it wrong. Or at least, that is not how we are going to do it, and for very good reasons.

We are reminding ourselves that what we are building will be bombproof and beautiful, and what they are building is clearly for profit and on the cheap. It might be sour grapes, but it also happens to be true!

At least they didn’t chop the trees down.