I have plenty of ideas of how to proceed, but I like to actually implement things in a fairly methodical fashion, especially if I'm doing it in public.
I spent some of the day before yesterday getting a GitHub project set up; you can now find all the code associated with this project at https://github.com/mdorman/couch-simple. I was pleased to find that TravisCI provides access to a CouchDB instance, which means that our testing story can be very clear—unwanted dependencies on the configuration of my local CouchDB server won't be an issue.
With that in mind, I pushed a skeleton project up night before last. Now real development can begin.