When our oldest son was born in 2000, we were living in one room that we’d cleaned by coating every surface with fresh paint.  We slowly worked on every other space in the house as well as adding some square footage a few years later.  I remember realizing that we needed to finish his bedroom when he declared after creating a large fort that he wanted “own space”.  I think there is real value in exposing kids to the construction process.  They start to understand just that, a process, in which stuff doesn’t happen instantaneously.  With technology and the faster pace of our lives, they’ve become accustomed to speed and quickness.  Our middle child didn’t see quite as much of this process as I would have liked, but our youngest… well he’ll be right in the thick of it.

Quite happily, it would seem.

I love having the opportunity to explain why houses are built the way they are, how we ground them to the earth, and how we capture light in certain ways.  I hope that by the end of this construction process going on in our backyard, that they will have imagined themselves in their rooms, and that by the time they move in, they will have become the people they imagined living here.

Besides, what could be better than having a dig-dig right there?