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.