Saturday, March 26th. The shoes I wore to meet the builder.

Numbers are scary. Numbers signifying your weight, your blood pressure, your bank account balance, your age. Numbers, as it turns out, more often than not highlight more of what you don’t have than what you do. Numbers, as is often the case, focus on what’s left out rather than what remains.

We received a significant set of numbers yesterday and went over them this afternoon at our long yellow table. These numbers in particular, list the costs associated with building our house. Five thousand dollars to demolish the garage, ten thousand to demolish the house. Fifty eight hundred for the French doors (WTF?!), but only eighteen hundred for the tub.

We chose Treebird Construction on the advice of our architects, Campie and Steve.

From Pantone’s 2016 Color of the Year: Rose Quartz and Serenity Color Pairings

We will watch these numbers like a hawk over the next year, sweating the details, looking for creative ways to keep them as low as possible. Will, in particular, will do most of the sweating.

I am too busy formulating the residential color palette.

For three hours, we sat with Ian, our builder, going through his spreadsheet, line by line (“How do you like working in Excel?” I, of course, couldn’t help but ask). Then we walked to that house on 2nd Avenue to show Ian the siding we like – what a coincidence! he built the kitchen in that house – and then to Top Pot.

Good! he said. Those blonde shelves aren’t too complicated. In fact, I will build them myself.

We feel really good about Ian. Our dogs love him; he’s a Colorado native, too; and he and his wife were married at the Rolling Huts, one of our favorite places in the world. mw|works also designed Ian’s house, which won a design award. Winning design awards isn’t that important to us, but if it happens, we won’t mind.

The chickens will be fostered out. What about the chicken coop? Can we move it to the corner of the front yard? It’s heavy.

He looked at it.

Let’s just disassemble it. That thing will be a pain in the ass to move around.

We have the financing secured from Washington Federal, a loft lined up in Ballard, and an estimate from Door-to-Door for storing our stuff. If all goes as planned, this number will become a pivotal one: 05 15 2016. The date we tear this house down.