wood splitting anyone?

Oh, I forgot to mention. Now that the giant brush pile I got so used to using as a landmark has been moved, we could get a full picture of the wood we've cut so far! If anyone wants to come for a quick visit and help split some wood, we've got lots to share! :-) Ha ha.

This is the future septic site. The trees to the right of the picture, near the big truck, will remain standing, there are some nice bigger trees in there, though they won't be much camoflage in the winter when the leaves drop. It will be amazing to see the winter landscape again, it's one of the times you realize the incredible difference in forest composition here as compared to the west coast.
We have been delighted to find the remains of an old apple orchard among the trees, still gridded out and everything. The first few trees we found we attributed to self seeding, but then the precise placement and regular spacing of them started to reveal a pattern. These trees are very tall and in need of a lot of renovation. We've got Tom's recommendations stored in the old brainpans, and we met a neighbor recently who worked in orchards for many years and is a pruning expert and loves to renovate trees. So we've got some more learning opportunities ahead. Okay, we'll upload more pictures on Saturday evening when we have some more to share. Thanks for reading.

This is from the parking area looking down the driveway. There's a tiny young grove of white birch in the right corner of the picture that we tagged to save. They are young and straight and beautiful and we'd like to see them grow up. We'll have to thin the grove a bit as they mature, but they're gorgeous trees. And it's nice to see a gentle little curve in our driveway! :-)

Here it is! The future basement! It's going to be a daylight basement, which is why it isn't super deep looking in the picture. We will be partially framing it, and there will be windows too. Our root cellar (yippee!) will be in the area farthest from the front of the picture. That area is actually going to be a bump out with a mudroom/bathroom upstairs and the root cellar framed off in the basement.
A mudroom and root cellar both in one house is really amazing to me! This job was taken up by our second bedroom in the Point Roberts house, and it was sort of a stretch for it at times...Now we need to get the gardens going to stock that root cellar!

Shawn's staning at the head of the driveway, to the right of the turnaround (it's behind him and not really in the picture). The basement excavation is what he's looking toward. Can you believe our little house will be standing there soon? We can't. Quite!

This picture is from Monday July 23.

We were busy over the weekend and couldn't get up to the land (it was pouring rain most of the time anyway) so when Monday came, we were excited to get up to Belfast and see what had been going on.

We were AMAZED! The fellow doing the site work, Derek, is almost 30 and is a really friendly person. Not only that, he takes his work seriously and gets it done fast. He's gotten the rough driveway in, and left up every tree that we tagged as wanting to remain. The foundation hole is excavated and smoothed out, and yesterday he told us that the footings were poured yesterday. The stumps are all removed from the area, much of the levelling work is done, and he used his excavator to push our four piles of brush into two piles, one in the back and one in the front. We won't burn it till winter time when burn piles are allowed again.

The stumps are all buried neatly away, just where we wanted them to go. And the site for the septic field is cleared out as well! We talked to Roy, our GC, last night, and he told us that Derek wanted to start the septic field today! We also met Derek's 13 year old cousin, Jordan, who is well spoken and friendly, and is helping out with the job. He splits his summers between helping with the excavation business and helping other uncles with a 600 acre dairy farm. Pretty impressive young man. He reports that he enjoys the dairying work most of all, and would like to carry on with it, which really made us happy to hear. It's nice to hear about family farms being passed down and preserved, and the work being enjoyed. Not everyone wants to get out of farming, though the work is probably hard and the $$ not guaranteed. :-)

We're headed up to the Belfast area on Saturday so we can see the walls poured into place for the basement, and check and see how the septic field looks. It's been wonderfully encouraging to be fortunate enough to be working with people that get their work done so quickly and so wonderfully! We'll add some more pics that we took of the site work, and have more coming along soon.

Once the basement walls are in and have cured a bit our job will to be to apply the waterproofing material, called Dry-Lock (or some mis-spelling of the word) to the walls, inside and out, and then once the curing process is done, we'll be ready to build, which seems almost inconceivable! But pleasantly so.

We've got A LOT to do before winter! :-)

Taking a Break...

Shawn's been having fun with the new saw, it cuts beautifully! And it sharpens up nicely too. It's amazing how when the sun is out and strong, and you are sweating up a storm, you can drink literally a gallon of water and never once need to use the bathroom!

We have also noted with interest that on hot sunny days, you work and think of nothing but wanting a big slurp of cold water. On the cool rainy days that we work, we aren't thirsty, but instead start planning elaborate dinners out loud with eachother, probably yelling across the fields since with the double hearing protection on, you forget how to regulate the sound of your voice! We've planned some good meals on cloudy days working out there, and have drunk some of the coolest, best tasting water ever on the hot ones!

the road we'll be taking

We met with the young man who's going to be taking care of all of our site work last Monday afternoon, and we're pretty excited about being able to have him do the work for us. He was supposed to start work on Thursday, but when we came to the land on Wednesday for an afternoon of hauling some firewood out of our cutting area (all that's left for us to clear is the septic area) we found the beginning of the driveway starting to come along! We were impressed! We've been busy with other things the last few days, so tomorrow will be a big day to hopefully see a lot more work done, including some destumping of the driveway and buidling site, and the roughed in driveway. We'll see what we see tomorrow and give an update...hopefully not waiting two weeks in between updates, as we seem to have slipped into the habit of doing.

It's a bit hard to tell from the picture, but the driveway follows the edge of our field and will curve slightly to the left to form a parking area with a turnaround. We're having a very narrow gravelled drive lead from the parking area to the side door of the mudroom right off the kitchen. The driveway area will stay to the left of the big trees in the center of the picture and the house itself will be located almost directly behind the big trees in the middle, but about 75 feet back behind them. Our stack of firewood logs has grown literally enormous! We think we may have three years of heat stacked there, given that we're insulating so well and maintaining a smaller sized home.

We'll have to post another update after we see what there is to be seen tomorrow afternoon. The fellow doing the sitework, Derek, thinks that it should be done in two weeks, three weeks at the outside if weather is difficult (meaning a lot of rain). However, we had a ton of rain this past week and this week's weather forecast is for some cloudiness early on, and then some warmer, pleasant, tomato weather for later in the week, which should prove a boon for not only beans and tomatoes, but also for cement curing! It still seems relatively like a dream that we'll be putting hammers to nails in the not so distant future!!

Here is Shawn in the center of what will be partially our homesite and partially land that we are clearing and opening up to be garden/field space. Many of the trees left in this picture (he's already taken several down by the time of the taking of this photo) are no longer standing. This area gets a ton of sun and will be great for gardens galore and good passive solar gain in the winter. The undergrowth in this area is mostly weeds and a curious sort of thing that looks a bit like a many fingered fern, but is definitely NOT in the fern family. It's almost a fleshy sort of plant - I'm completely at a loss as to how to describe it. In any case, it gets quite tall! There is another huge brush pile to the right of Shawn in the picture, which has expanded many times in size since the taking of this photo. I think this photo was taken last week on the fourth, which was our second day of clearing. We're having a lot of fun!

This is one of the two huge brush piles we have going. This brush includes all the low growing undergrowth, as well as the tree tops and brushy limbs coming off the trees we have brought down. It's frustrating to be limited to two dimensional (or would that be one dimensional) photos to try and share this with you, as the dimensions of this pile are much larger!! This pile is a monster, it goes in more directions than can be shared in a flat photo. It's a very very satisfying thing, to make a gigantic brush pile!
There are no burn permits issued in summer time here, so we'll save the brush burning for some awesome bonfires come winter time. :-)

Here is some of the wood we've cut so far for future firewood warmth. We hope to build a woodshed, cut and split a lot of this while the site work is being done, hopefully starting next week. The piece that I'm holding is one that we thought looked just like a pair of little pants! It's cute! And it makes a fine seat in the woods!

Back to Normal, Jamie and Shawn are Working in Their Yard Again!

Hi there everyone! Sorry for the extensive delay in blogging. At the end of a day's work, we are excited and jazzed up with energy from spending a few hours clearing, but after the close to one hour drive home, we are ready to eat and that's it! So, I thought I would write before we go up to work today and see if that proves a solution.

It will be very hard to see from this picture all that we've been doing this past week and a half. We've been up to the land most everyday, and try to put in two and a half to three hours of cutting and brush hauling - which is enough. It's a good limit, as the body gets tired pretty quickly from this kind of work. It has been FABULOUS to be working on real ground again! It would be impossible to explain how good a feeling it is, and how good it feels to sink into slumber fully and truly exhausted from an afternoon of hard work - I think it's safe to say we are in heaven! Now if we can get the site work done... :-)

So, to decode the picture (we're sure it will be MUCH easier to see the work we've done come winter when there's not a green leaf in site!)...the field is about a half acre in size (roughly the size of our old land in toto). Our building site is going to be to the right of the two large trees you see in the center of the photo (it looks like one, but it's actually two big old apple trees waiting for winter renovation and a big maple behind it - so really, it's three trees!). I say to the right, but I mean to the right and then about 75 feet back. That area was completely treed (aside from the field, the land is covered in trees, mostly very young - the tallest are only about 50 feet tall where we are clearing, and the tallest ever greens and white birch and alder we are leaving alone as they are in safe spots on the land, are probably 100 feet tall, maximum). So we have cut the trees down and limbed them, separating firewood from winter time burn material. We have got some VERY TALL brush piles going, and a delightful pile of firewood going - lots of maple and cherry. To the left of the trees in the middle of the photo, and indeed along the left hand side of the field, is where the driveway and turnaround are going to be - hopefully in the very near future! The right hand corner of the field will have the septic drainage field in it. We were originally going to put that field in the woods slightly further to the right of what you can see in the photo, but we're seeing the folly and madness of that now and are going to change that.

Weather has been really lovely. It's been in the mid to upper 70's, with more sunny days than cloudy...the cloudy days are much nicer for working in, though, as it's hot work in the clearing. Sometimes, clouds will cover over the sun for a bit while we are working, and that is a lovely sensation! There've been good breezes, but not so high that we aren't able to fall trees. That's also appreciated. The trees have fallen, 85 percent of the time, where Shawn's intended them to go, and the few weird falls have been only slightly off. This is great! More shortly.

Hallelujah, We're at Work Again!

Here's one of the first trees Shawn took down. The actual date this photo was taken was the third of July. We closed on the second, walked across town and got our building permit, a process which took exactly 11 minutes (read it and weep, Whatcom County) as well as our new address. We then took a walk on the land. Wow, it's SO lush in summer here. It's a landscape utterly transformed from winter's austerity. Things you couldn't imagine emerging from the gray brown surface of late winter are absolutely EVERYWHERE! And since this land was once cleared for pasture land (our GC remembers it as field about 25 years ago) there is much young growth - the sort of growth you see in re-establishing woodland. Winter will be a good time for clearing some of this away and making a path to walk the land. The river was hard to reach, and we used the machete, but was lovely! It's low for summer, but wonderfully cool and private, very green. The river bed is full of fieldstone and flat, heavy chunks of granite based stone. It's already becoming a bit easier to imagine our little house being situated here, and that in and of itself is very exciting.