Driveway Rough-In Nov 2016

Fall progress

We did nothing on the property until September.  Nothing. We didn't even visit until our anniversary in July.  There was that other thing we were doing all spring and summer that took all our time. We also did some big house projects at our current house.

But since September, we've been continuing to clear trees and dream. We met with the Architectural Control Committee for the HOA in mid-September, talked with the county planning department about our plans to build not within one of the building envelopes on the plat, and had an engineering firm design a driveway.  The modular home builder we want to use said the lot was too steep and didn't want to take on our project, but we pressed on and met with their transportation engineer and they agreed it can work.  We now have a preliminary floor plan.



Here are some pictures from this fall. It sure is pretty up there.

This was the pattern inside the trunk of a shrub we cut down. :-)

The Toyota is a good little truck!

We positioned a game camera in a couple of spots.

Just browsing

Elk butt!

Nice rack

Moose

The real work starts next week. Stay tuned.

The start of roughing in the proposed driveway!

Saving money on a Christmas tree

By November, we stopped the hard labor and began the dreaming. We are looking at house plans incessantly, trying to figure out what style, size, and type of home we would like to build.  We are not on the same page exactly, but we're in the same chapter anyway. 

As the holidays were creeping up on us, we did one last chore and thinned a stand of five little fir trees down to three and brought one home for us and one for the neighbors.

These trees were too close together, so we harvested one for the Christmas tree

 We also had a little fun while we were up there.

Snowy view

Porcupines do not hibernate

BEST Christmas tree ever!

It might not happen next year, but maybe by 2017 we could be celebrating amongst those trees instead of bringing them off the mountain.

For now, we'll take our survey, play with house plans, and figure out what needs to happen next.

37 piles

The first snows fall at 8000 in mid October around the Wild West.  It was time to do a final clean-up day.

D explaining how to cut down a tree

Me doing the work.

The next 37 pictures are piles of wood and brush.  Sorry for the lack of Instagram-quality content, but I wanted to inventory what we did this year.  Add to these 37 piles, two large pick-up loads and a large trailer load of wood that we sold, about 15 brush piles that the fire department chipped for us after the AmeriCorp work, and about three pickup loads that were pilfered by a Wild West neighbor.  With the AmeriCorp hours we have logged almost 200 hours of work, mostly hard labor, on the property.  

The area we want to build is pretty well clear of dead fall and the trees have been limbed up somewhat, and we have cleared dead fall from quite a bit of the land down to the road to create defensible fire space, but we could easily spend another entire season cleaning up.  We'll call this good for the year.

 

so rotten

big one!