The Lot

Carlisle is a small town in central Pennsylvania.  When we first moved here we lived about five miles out of town and found that we were driving into town once or twice everyday.  At some point, we decided that it made sense for us to move into town.

Once we made the decision that we would move into town, we started looking for houses.  We were looking for an energy efficient house that had good southern exposure and an open floor plan.  We searched for quite some time but had a lot of trouble finding something that really felt like us.  The new homes were relatively efficient but didn't have a whole lot of character.  The old homes were beautiful and unique but were very inefficient.  At some point, the idea of building our own house came up (Virginia's parents had built their own house about 30 years ago).  Unfortunately, there are not too many building lots in Carlisle.

In 2002, while doing a 10k run during Carlisle's "Summer Fair" celebration, we ran right by a set of three building lots that were ideally located. The lots were fairly large, partially wooded and had good southern exposure. We memorized the phone number on the 'for sale' sign and by the time we called there was only one lot left. Although we had no serious plan to build at that time, we made a deal to purchase the lot within a few days. We figured it would be a good investment if we ended up selling it later. This turned out to be one of the best decisions we ever made.

Our lot in Carlisle.