EFFINGHAM COUNTY, Ga. — The small gray brick house off Hodgeville Road was supposed to be the place Kris Mitchell never had to leave.

She says it was chosen carefully, lived in fully, and imagined as permanent — a “forever home” built around love and loss.

“This was my forever home,” she said.

Then, she says, the outside world started moving closer.

Mitchell’s home sits directly in the path of a county-led road project at the intersection of Goshen Road and Hodgeville Road, where officials plan to build a roundabout and widen surrounding roadways. The work has brought construction, right-of-way changes and property acquisition into a stretch of Effingham County that residents describe as once quiet and residential — and for Mitchell, it has reshaped what she believed was a permanent home, one she came to associate with a period of personal loss in her life.

Her experience reflects a broader reality in growing communities, where large infrastructure projects can reshape daily life in deeply personal ways — affecting not just roads and traffic patterns, but privacy, stability and the sense of home.

A private world inside the house

Inside the 1950s-era house, Mitchell and her late fiancé — whom she refers to as “Georgie” — made something more than a life there. They created a private language around the home and their relationship.

He called himself “Georgie,” after late comedian George Burns.

So she became “Gracie,” after Burns’ wife and longtime comedy partner, Gracie Allen.

Mitchell says Georgie even called the property “Gracie’s Paradise,” a phrase that still appears in small signs around the home.

“This was my roots,” she said. “I was going to be buried in the backyard.”

Mitchell, 56, moved into the roughly 530-square-foot home in May 2023. She says Georgie purchased it with cash while battling terminal cancer, quietly preparing a place where she could live after he was gone.

He also bought much of what was inside it, she said — the furniture, the sense of completeness, and even details of how the home was arranged.

She says she didn’t even know he had bought the house until it was nearly complete.

“I thought we were just looking,” she said. “Then he just bought it. Cash.”

For Mitchell, the home became both memory and promise — a fixed point she believed would remain unchanged even after loss.

“I thought this was mine to lose,” she said. “Like no one was going to be able to kick me out.”

Georgie died less than a year later.

Around the same time, Mitchell says she began to understand just how deeply attached she had become to the property — not just emotionally, but practically, in a place where she says low land taxes made staying there feel possible even after his death.

“It was mine,” she said quietly. “You know? It was mine.”

A landscape transformed

The house sits near Whispering Pines, an RV resort community. Mitchell says she sometimes escapes to a nearby lake there to get away from the noise that now surrounds her property.

The lake, she says, once felt like part of the peace that came with living there — a place to fish, sit quietly and breathe. Now, it is one of the few places where she can still get away from the sound of construction.

Inside the home, that noise does not stay outside.

She says motorcycles, trucks and heavy equipment can be heard throughout the day as construction continues near the Goshen and Hodgeville corridor. At times, she says, the entire structure vibrates.

“Everything shakes,” she said, once gripping a dining room table as construction trucks passed outside.

She also shares the home with her dog, Atticus Finch, a six-year-old mix of a Bichon Frise and Shih Tzu that she lovingly calls a “very expensive mutt.”

Mitchell says he has become increasingly anxious as construction noise has grown around the property, reacting to the sound of trucks, machinery and vibrations that carry through the house.

She has covered her windows with static cling film from Amazon and keeps blinds drawn to block the view from passing workers and traffic.

“People can see into my house now,” she said. “I didn’t buy this to live in a cave.”

She says windows and the foundation have begun to crack. The home’s original 1954 windows are expensive to replace, she said, and she avoids opening them because of dust.

The front door is harder to close now, she said. Parts of the structure seem to shift when heavy equipment moves nearby.

She has also begun replanting parts of the yard in an effort to rebuild privacy that once came naturally from trees along the road. New evergreen plantings stand only a few feet tall.

“They used to hide everything,” she said.

Now, she says, even the landscape feels altered. Plants have had to be moved or replaced because sunlight and conditions have changed around the property.

“It’s like a different ecosystem,” she said. “Nothing grows the same.”

What remains

Inside the home, small reminders of the life she and Georgie shared remain.

Rolling Stones posters hang on the walls — a shared interest between them. A custom bed frame, she said, was built for her by a welder on Hilton Head Island, a gift from Georgie after he modified a design originally made for a California king bed.

She still keeps Christmas lights in the backyard — solar strands she says are her “homage to Georgie,” inspired by the colorful decorations at the tiki bar Georgie owned in South Carolina. At night, she says, the yard glows softly.

“I feel weird talking about all this,” she said at one point. “I don’t want to be a victim. I’m not a victim.”

Mitchell herself is also a cancer survivor, diagnosed with thyroid cancer years ago and now four years cancer-free.

That experience, she says, is part of why she resists framing her current situation in purely tragic terms.

But she also says it does not change what she is watching happen around her.

The notice that changed everything

In April 2024, Mitchell says she received notice tied to the Goshen Road project and the planned roundabout at Hodgeville Road. Portions of her property, she was told, would be taken or altered through eminent domain.

Mitchell says she understood the project would affect her property, but not to the extent she feels it has now. She says what is happening around the home feels far more intrusive and disruptive than what she believed she had emotionally prepared herself for when the process began.

Months later, Mitchell says she settled with the county after initially receiving an offer she felt did not reflect what the property meant to her. But she says the money never felt connected to what was actually being lost.

“I don’t know if I can stay here now,” she said. Mitchell says she is now considering her next steps, including approaching the county about rezoning the property to commercial use.

For her, the hardest part has not been paperwork or construction.

It has been watching the place she once imagined as permanent slowly feel less like home.