Some places grow on you over time.
The Adirondacks weren’t like that for me.
The first time I visited this area, I knew it was special. The mountains, the forests, the quiet roads, and the feeling that you were surrounded by wilderness in every direction. It felt different from anywhere else I had spent time.
From that first trip on, I always said the same thing:
“Someday I want to live here.”
At the time, though, it felt more like a dream than an actual plan.
Whenever we visited the Adirondacks we usually spent time around Lake Placid. And if you’ve ever looked at real estate there, you know the prices can make that dream feel pretty unrealistic. From what we could see, owning a place here seemed way out of reach.
What we didn’t realize at the time was that the Adirondacks are much bigger than Lake Placid. There were other towns and communities scattered throughout the mountains where owning land was actually possible.
But we didn’t know that yet.
So the Adirondacks remained what they had always been for us — an incredible place to visit.
The Trip That Changed Everything
Then COVID happened.
Like a lot of people in 2020, I suddenly found myself working remotely full-time. That opened up an idea we hadn’t really considered before.
What if we tried living in the Adirondacks for a while?
Not permanently. Just a test run.
We decided to rent an Airbnb near the Adirondack Loj for a month. The idea was simple: spend a month in the mountains and see what it would be like to work remotely from there.
There was only one problem.
The place didn’t have WiFi.
The owner told us they were getting it installed soon, and if it didn’t happen they would refund our reservation. That seemed reasonable enough, so we booked it.
As the trip got closer, though, the WiFi never materialized.
About a month before we were supposed to arrive, it became clear it wasn’t going to happen. Suddenly we were scrambling to find another place to stay.
Eventually we found something available, but it was about 30–40 minutes away from Lake Placid.
Not exactly what we had planned.
But we booked it anyway.
The Little Chalet in the Woods
That unexpected change turned out to be the moment that changed everything.
The place we rented was a small chalet tucked deep in the woods, about three miles off the main road. There were other homes back there too, but they were all spread out on large, heavily wooded lots.
It felt quiet. Private. Surrounded by forest.
The kind of place where you wake up and all you hear are birds and wind in the trees.
We instantly fell in love with it.
At one point my wife looked around and said something simple that ended up changing the course of things.
“I could live here.”
I agreed.
And suddenly the idea didn’t feel crazy anymore.
Discovering What Was Possible
During that month-long stay we started doing something we hadn’t really done before.
We began looking at nearby properties.
That’s when we realized something important: once you get outside of Lake Placid itself, there were actually places we could afford.
One property in particular caught our attention.
It was a little smaller than some of the others, but it was in the same kind of wooded setting we had fallen in love with during that stay.
We decided to go for it.
We ended up purchasing the property for $5,500.
What started as a simple one-month experiment in working remotely from the mountains had suddenly turned into something very different.
We now owned land in the Adirondacks.
The Plan: A Future Vacation Home
At that point we still had no intention of living in the Adirondacks full-time.
My job was based elsewhere and remote work wasn’t something anyone was talking about as a permanent option yet. The idea was to build a small place that we could use as a vacation home — somewhere to spend weekends, ski in the winter, ride bikes in the summer, and eventually retire to someday.
Owning the land felt like the first step toward that future.
The rest of our month in the Adirondacks quickly turned into something very different from the trip we had planned. Instead of just exploring the area, we spent much of the time talking with builders and researching what it would take to build a small place in the woods.
Reality Sets In
That’s when we ran into our first big obstacle.
COVID had created a perfect storm in the construction world. Demand for building materials had exploded, supply chains were a mess, and lumber prices had gone completely off the rails.
At one point lumber was hovering around $1000 per thousand board feet, a number that meant very little to me at the time other than the fact that everyone in construction kept repeating it with a bit of disbelief.
What I did understand were the estimates we were getting.
Even for a modest vacation home, the prices were far higher than we had expected.
We reached out to several builders in the area, but many never responded. One person who consistently did was Dan from Vincent Family Construction. He was great about answering questions and talking through possibilities.
But at the end of the day, the numbers just didn’t make sense.
Reluctantly, I sent Dan an email letting him know we were going to have to put the project on hold for a while.
The timing just wasn’t right.
Hitting Pause
Eventually our month in the Adirondacks came to an end.
We headed back home with something we hadn’t arrived with — a small piece of land in the Adirondack woods and a future plan that was now on pause.
COVID slowly faded from the headlines. Lumber prices eventually began settling down. Life started returning to something that felt a little more normal again.
For a while, the idea of building in the Adirondacks stayed exactly where we left it.
On hold.
But what we didn’t know at the time was that another change was coming — one that would completely reshape the plan.
My job would soon become fully remote.
And suddenly that little piece of land in the woods wouldn’t just be a future vacation home anymore.
It could become home.
