A dream comes to life: Family's home begins to come together despite pandemic hurdles

Building a new dream home is a process that takes time, especially in a pandemic.

Korbi Ashton, her husband, Stephen, and seven children are waiting on their dream family home to come together, with the foundation finally being laid. The family of nine is staying with family members in an Othello pool house while they eagerly await some extra space.

Korbi Ashton said she started planning her dream home, nestled out in the countryside, when she first married her husband.

“I’ve always wanted to live out in the country on a farm,” Ashton said. “I grew up in southern Idaho on a farm, and it’s always just been something I’ve aspired to.”

The new, roughly 4,900-square-foot home will be on about five acres on Road N Southeast, off State Route 17, outside of Moses Lake. Ashton said they started designing the project in September with the help of her younger brother, Kalan Beck, who does architectural design work.

“The first rough sketch was my brother with a napkin at the kitchen table,” Ashton said. “He did redo it two or three times, but we kept going back to the first design.”

She said her brother knows the style she’s looking for and pretty much custom-designed the entire home. Ashton said she’s always wanted an old farmhouse to remodel, but she and her husband aren’t the most “handy people.”

Given the costs of a remodeling, she said, they elected to design with features of an older home, while still offering the luxuries of a new build. They added a lot of “character” that makes the home feel like the remodeled farmhouse she’s always dreamed of.

“We have window seats and little benches and library nooks and a lot of those old character things that you’d find in older homes,” Ashton said. “But it’s the best of both worlds. He gets a new house, and I get character.”

Ashton said they’ve tried to do as much of the work as possible, while finding their own contractors and builders for the project. Going through this process was a little tougher due to the pandemic; not being able to go into offices and meet with people.

“Permits were probably the hardest thing so far,” Ashton said. “You can’t go into offices and talk to people with COVID and stuff like that, so that was a long drawn-out process. This is our first build, so I don’t have much to compare it to, but it seems like now everything seems to take longer.”

Luckily, she said she’s noticed how tight-knit the building community is with a lot of builders and contractors being happy to recommend people to Ashton and her husband for other parts of the project.

Finding people they knew to help has been beneficial, too, including a friend in Utah who works in the tile industry. A lot of the buying process has been done online, waiting on tile samples to come in before knowing what they’ll look or feel like.

Many of the new dream home’s features are designed with the large family in mind. Ashton said the new home has a “schoolroom” for the kids to get on their Chromebooks or study.

A spacious laundry room might be her favorite feature of the new home, the one place Ashton said she told

her husband he couldn’t cut down any of the square footage.

“As someone with seven kids, I spend the majority of my time in the kitchen and the laundry room, so it has to flow and it has to work,” Ashton said.

Ashton said she had to remind her brother, a single man with no kids, a few times during the design process that certain things just wouldn’t work with youngsters running around. She said her brother’s renderings of her new home have been great to have, though, throughout the process, giving her a sneak peak of what the new home will look like.

She recalled texting her brother in the middle of the night to let him know she wanted to have terracotta tiles only to wake up the next morning to renderings of her new laundry room, complete with requested green cabinets and terracotta tiling.

“It just got me more excited,” Ashton said. “Seeing small glimpses of the place as we go along, I’m just getting more and more excited.”

The new dream home will feature an open-floor plan, with a sizable garage and sunroom built on. An avid plant-lover herself, Ashton said her husband is hoping the new sun room will be able to contain all of her plants, after she joked her plants would simply “begin” in the sunroom.

Ashton said her daughter told her she couldn’t wait to have her own space to spread out all her stuff, as she just received new things for her birthday and Christmas.

“You and me both sister,” Ashton responded.

The Ashton family’s home is still about a year from being finished, with the frame to go up in March. And with five acres of new land to conquer, Korbi Ashton said they’re ready to “go for it.”

Casey McCarthy can be reached at cmccarthy@columbiabasinherald.com.