We’ve come to understand* that building a house is a series of tradeoffs.

For our Medford project, our choice was “You can hire professional painters, but you’ll be eating ramen for a  few months.”  So the Bates crew pitched in to help paint our new place.

The decisions on Flying Point Road got a little bigger.  Our contractor did a great job at managing a tight budget, but after a particularly tough month, he told us “porch or fireplace.”  (It wasn’t a question.)  We went with porch and the fireplace came a few years later.

Dash Landing has been different still.  We went into the project with a few specifics, but the requests were typically more functional more than aesthetic –relatively small footprint, master bedroom on the first floor, geothermal, a brighter kitchen, etc.

But along the way, we agreed that we’d revisit the “fun stuff” down the road.  And after we had bid out the core project, Rob tackled a few ideas that had bounced around during the design process.

This is one of those ideas :

It’s a cupola that would sit on top of the garage/barn thingy.  Glass on all sides.  A cool hinged ladder that would be raised & lowered by a rope.  And enough room inside to sit, set up a camera, etc.

Absolutely awesome and now that the garage/barn thingy is all framed out, we can really see how spectacular it would have looked, especially from the main road.  A few lights up there on a dark night, sitting high up in the field, framed by the trees — beautiful.

But we decided not to build it.

Yes, the expense was part of the decision.  The cupola had just a bit of a “world’s most expensive go-pro housing” feeling.  But it was more “timing” than “absolute amount.”  We needed to make this decision weeks ago — before kitchens, cabinets, lighting, etc.  And an impractical luxury at the end of a process is far wiser than one at the beginning.

No regrets, but if anyone has a spare $20k or so lying around and would like to help make an artistic statement — well, you know where we live.  And we need it by Tuesday.

* All our posts should start with that sentence….