Burn day!

We've had some issues getting ready to build on the property, but meanwhile, we just keep cleaning up the place.

We have worked all summer to get the piles from last fall...

Last fall

  Into this:

 

We had the piles of waste wood covered to keep dry so we could burn them

Here is a picture and a video of the large burn we did a couple of weeks ago. We are burning mostly un-harvestable wood from the slash piles from last fall's driveway.

How to stack wood

Remember the giant pile of aspen that the excavator piled up last year when roughing in the driveway?

The track hoe can move big trees so easily. It's kind of sad.

That's a lot of aspen.

Well, we've been harvesting it for firewood.  Yes, we know, aspen makes poor fuel, but we either have to cut it small enough to put into burn piles or pay to haul it away. As long as we are handling it, we might as well put it to some good use, eventually, in the wood stove.

So for now we are cutting the logs into 18-inch lengths and stacking out of the way of the future construction site.

We made a 2-minute time lapse video of building one of the stacks.

Wildlife highway

We've been progressing very slowly.  We've got plans for a house and we're going through permitting.

Meanwhile, we've put up a game camera and this is what we are seeing.

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.