What happened in the past year

So, we had to plan for a whole house. The first question was where to site it on the lot. We have a freestanding garage we did not want to tear down. A 50 ft setback from the lake is required, and 10 ft from the garage. That left a rather small range of possibilities, if we wanted to use the same driveway, septic and well. As it is, we will lose a chunk of the parking area. (The sketch map below is not to scale but gives a rough idea of the situation.)

Another question was the soil. We knew the ground was wet and the soil very mucky. We had the soil tested and found a deep layer of peat, water at one foot below the surface, and marl at about 35 feet. We would need deep pilings to support the structure. Also, a below-grade foundation is not ideal. We are planning to have the house about 18 inches above grade.
In March we started working on the plans, trying a number of layouts before settling on T-shape with a sunroom on the southeast side for the ground floor, and an L shape for the second floor. We hope that with a large south and east exposure of glass and excellent insulation that passive solar will do most of the heating in winter. We will put solar hot water on the roof and that should also help with the heat distribution, when integrated with a radiant floor heat system.
By the end of July the plans were finished (slowed down a bit by my traveling out of the country), and we had an engineer design the foundations. The contractor then began to price the house and we were able to meet in November and decided to aim to begin construction in February. Since we work in Chicago and cannot get away reliably in winter (very dependent on road conditions) we had to move out between Christmas and Jan 4th.
So today, we have most of our furniture in storage and have just a few essentials left so we can hang on for a few more days and watch the chickadees, goldfinches, titmice and such eat up the last of the seed (don't want to put that in storage and host a family of mice).