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Years ago, my husband, Jaydon, and I were driving through a little bowl of farmland just east of Beaverlodge. As fields and stands of poplar blurred past the truck window, a thought slipped into my mind as quickly as the landscape itself.

"I would love to live here one day."

I grew up in a small town, so places like this have always had a way of pulling at me. Places where people know your name, where every street becomes familiar, and where your favourite little coffee shop or hidden viewpoint somehow ends up being everyone else's favourite too.

A few years later, I discovered the magic of Saskatoon Mountain in autumn. The winding road to the top was lined with gold, every corner brighter than the last, and the crisp air carried the unmistakable scent of fallen leaves. At the summit ("mountain" being a generous term if you've ever been there), you can see the Rockies stretching along the southern horizon while the Peace Country unfolds endlessly below. Tiny vehicles crawl along the highway like ants, and for a moment, the world feels peacefully still and small.

For as long as we've been together, Jaydon and I have dreamed of owning an acreage. Not just any acreage, but one where we could build a home from the ground up and shape the land around it to fit the life we wanted to live. As the years passed and housing prices climbed, that dream started to feel more like a distant possibility than a future plan. Still, we never stopped watching the market.

Oddly enough, we'd each imagined almost the exact same home long before we met. Whether that's coincidence or simply proof that a lot of people share the same dream, I'm not sure. But after building it, we've lost count of how many people have said, "That's my dream home."

Spoiler alert...we built it.

Then one day, the property appeared.

The previous owner had spent nearly thirty years camping there, waiting for the day he would build his own dream home. Life had other plans, and suddenly the land was for sale. The price was right, so we wasted no time. I think it was the very evening it was listed that we walked the property for the first time.

I fell in love with the forest.

Towering poplar wrapped around the land, making it feel quiet, secluded, and untouched. Jaydon, on the other hand, immediately fixated on the old, dilapidated shed that desperately needed to come down. Naturally, we explored it. Inside, tucked neatly beside a well-worn King James Bible, sat a rather scandalous little book titled Lusty Limericks.

To this day, I still wonder about that pairing.

The summer of 2021 was spent tearing down that shed, turning what was little more than a goat trail into a driveway, and clearing enough trees to make room for the house we'd been imagining for years. Then, in the spring of 2022, armed with blueprints and a healthy dose of optimism, we moved into our little camper on the property and began bringing that dream to life.

For months, we worked full time, would come home, spend the evenings working on the house, go to bed, and wake up the next morning just to do it all over again. Whatever stores of energy I had, I depleted in my early 30's and now I feel like a husk of a person most days. Kidding, not kidding. Honestly, I am sitting here typing this in my 98% completed house, and I wouldn't change a thing.