⟨PLACEHOLDER — Dave + Yulia's real telling.⟩ The draft below is the polished draft to rework — placeholder, needs Dave + Yulia's final telling before publish.
Our story
Everything we build gets measured twice and cut once. Usually. The one time it didn't, the name stuck — and so did the habit of doing things over until they're right.
We're the Murrays. We didn't plan to run a rental business; we planned to fix up two places we love. First the Cape house — our family's summer landing spot for years, the one with the fenced yard and the bike trail to ice cream. Then the cabin in Vermont, which we couldn't stop improving until it became the boutique log cabin on the edge of the forest.
Yulia named them. She's Ukrainian, and she chose the words on purpose: a dacha is the summer place a family escapes to when the weather warms — our Cape house, exactly. A hata is the rustic country home built to keep you warm against the elements — our cabin in the mountains. Two words for two ways of getting away.
We share them because we love watching other families find what we found. And we can't help ourselves — every season, something gets a little better. Come back next year and you'll see.
No clean family photo in the set. The only people shots are held pending Dave/Yulia's explicit OK.