I woke up this morning feeling compelled to write down the story of our current home. It’s a complicated story, but as I continue to struggle with some aspects of it, I think the catharsis of writing will be helpful.

We bought a home in 2015 that would be a major remodel. I didn’t know anything about home improvement and spent a lot of time on youtube learning. It was a really rewarding experience. Unfortunately, we ended up putting more money into the project that we could afford to pay for, and by the middle of 2018 we were struggling financially.

There were many parts of our family life that we felt needed to be streamlined and simplified. Joanna and I had been reading and learning about the tiny house movement - we weren’t ready for that, but thought it would be wise to significantly downsize from our 2400sqft house. We wanted to live closer to downtown, so we bought a small, infill lot in midtown Coeur d’Alene and began planning for a home.

We looked at many different options for money-saving, smallish houses (mostly in the 1000sqft range) with 2 bedrooms. We needed space for ourselves and our two daughters, and while we were committed to small, we didn’t want to be in a 300sqft tiny home.

This led us down the road of prefab, modular construction. Lots of options there, but at some point we came across a company called IndieDwell. In October of 2018 they were building single-family homes in their factory in Boise out of used shipping containers. They offered a 960sqft, 2 bedroom, 2 bath home for about $125,000 (plus the cost of a foundation and site work). I spoke with Pete Gombert, who is their Executive Chairman as of the time of this writing, and he told me that they would be able to sell us one of their homes and ship it to Coeur d’Alene. We didn’t have the land yet, so we working on purchasing that into the summer of 2019.

I reached out and made an appointment to tour their facility and model home in Boise that July. We are about 8 hours from Boise in Coeur d’Alene, so it was an excuse for Joanna and I to get away for a weekend.

In what turned out to be a sign of things to come, they forgot about our appointment. We showed up and no one there knew anything about us. We waited around for about 30 minutes until a couple of their executives arrived to show us around the model and answer questions.

We loved what we heard. The homes were environmentally friendly due to their recycled shells, they were super energy efficient (our electric bills should average $50/mo they said), the finishes were modern in their aesthetics, the floor plan was just what we were looking for, and they were a certified B Corp, which checked a lot of boxes for ethical business. We were sold. We put $1,000 down on July 15th, 2019 with the knowledge that it would be a full year before they could build our home (they were very busy). In the mean time we sold our house, moved into a rented space and waited.

It was October of 2019 when we got to pick out our finishes - siding, flooring, appliance colors, paint. Not super custom but all really nice looking options. We were excited about the house. We made another payment of about $25,000 and waited.

We worked through the process of preparing for our home to be delivered into the spring of 2020. Everything was going great until the beginning of March, when, well…

Covid didn’t really hold up the project that much, but as we got closer to delivery, I realize now that the communication between the site supervisor and me and my local contractor wasn’t that great. They had never installed a home this far from Boise and, as I would find out later, they weren’t going to sell to individual homeowners moving forward. They were in the process of radically changing their business model, and I think we were sort of the last dregs of the old one that needed mopped up.

After the home arrived, there were some challenging hangups because of that failure of communication. I’ll save that for the next post. For now, take a look at how cool it was to have our house craned into place.

Our IndieDwell Home, Part 1, or, The Pursuit Of Simplicity