Jacqueline ElliottLeadership Strategist | CEO, Mother, Wife, Legacy-Builder

Our dream house was built first with our imagination , a paper napkin, and a pen… Then came the work

16 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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1:05

In this personal narrative, the speaker recounts the dramatic transition from selling a million‑dollar home to living in a modest rented space with mattresses on the floor. While they were in this temporary situation, Jackie (the speaker’s partner) flew to Arizona, scouted a lot, and decided it would be the site for their new home. She sketched the entire house and infinity pool on a napkin, envisioning a single‑story, glass‑heavy design with a large pool. Demonstrating extreme commitment, Jackie began purchasing all the furniture for the future house before construction even started, storing everything for four years while the couple built their business in the rent‑house. After three years of hard work, the house was finally completed, and the couple moved in, celebrating by getting a tattoo. The story highlights vision, sacrifice, long‑term planning, and the emotional payoff of realizing a dream home.

Chapters

We had sold our million-dollar house. We were sleeping in a small rent house on mattresses on the floor, no furniture in it. And Jackie flies to Arizona to buy this piece of land. She just flew to Phoenix, and then she was driving around for 2 days and ended up in this neighborhood. And this was a pile of dirt, and she's like, this is where we're going to do it. And then she came home and drew this napkin with this big pool running through this house, and she was like, there's going to be a lot of windows, a lot of glass, there's going to be an infinity pool, you know, it's going to be a single story. And she just started to tell me all about Bought it. She bought everything when the house wasn't even done. It hadn't even gotten started. We didn't even move yet. She started to buy furniture for it. She put it in a storage and it sat in storage for 4 years. Damn, dude, she's crazy like you. She crazy, bro. We moved out here, they moved the furniture, put it in the storage. We lived in a rent house with someone else's furniture, someone else's stuff, where we built our business for, you know, 3 years. All of a sudden, this house one day comes to completion, and now we're sitting in it getting a tattoo. You know?