Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
Eric Hodgins
 The book begins in fictional Landsdale County, Connecticut, where Jim and Muriel Blandings are being shown an old farmhouse by a real estate agent. Blandings, a successful New York advertising executive, and his wife want to leave their tiny Midtown apartment, where they live with their two daughters. They fantasize that the farmhouse will meet their needs. After some negotiation, they buy the house. They soon learn that the house is structurally unsound and must be torn down. They design the perfect home in the country, imagining an idyll, but they are quickly beset by construction troubles, temperamental workmen, skyrocketing bills, threatening lawyers, and difficult neighbors. The Blandings' dream house soon threatens to be the nightmare that undoes them. Hodgins wrote a sequel, Blandings Way, published in 1950. The short story and novel were based on the author Eric Hodgins's experience with buying property and building a house in the Merryall area of the Litchfield County, Connecticut, town of New Milford. His former house, which still stands, sold in August 2004 for $1.2 million.