What does it mean to build a house? How can it change a life? What happens if the builder is a woman, a teacher and a writer, a woman unaccustomed to tools? How does such a woman come to build at all? What happens, then, if that first house, whose every nail is known, is sold? How does one leave such a house, leave and go on to build another? This is a building story, but more it is a story of a woman builder and those without whom she could not have built. It is about how building changed not only that woman but also her sense of what a house is, how she came to know that building houses of wood builds the house of the spirit.