It’s been a long road to get to this point, but we’re finally ready to start framing the house. Grapes and his crew brought in another 69 loads of dirt to complete the backfill around the house and inside the foundation walls for the basement and garage slabs. With the backfill in place, Copperhead Plumbing…
Category: Land Development
We’re diggin’ the foundation
Bob Grapes made short work of the foundation excavation. It took him less than a week to dig out the footprint for all the footers and piers. Luckily he only ran into a little resistance from one of the large rocks on our land, which he took care of with his industrial sized rock hammer….
When nature calls, we can handle it
It isn’t one of the most exciting things, but a good septic system was critical for our new mountain home. Our delicate local ecosystem demands the responsible use of our water and waste water, so we had a sophisticated septic system designed by Barta & Associates. The system was constructed to perform well in our…
What a view
From the first time we saw our lot, we always had to imagine what our final view would actually look like. There were so many trees, it was hard to even see anything beyond them. We knew the mountain range was out there and occasionally we’d catch a glimpse of Lion’s Head through the trees…
The water well to China
Now that the driveway finally provides access to our lot for big machinery, we are able to start drilling for mountain gold – otherwise known as water. James Drilling moved in their equipment in preparation to start drilling when they had an unexpected mechanical failure. It took a few days to get the parts they…
Holy driveway, Batman
Shortly after we signed our construction contract, the excavator was pulling up to our lot to put in the driveway. They spent a day clearing out the trees in the path of the new driveway and then spent the next couple of weeks hauling in dirt – literally tons of dirt. Today, we finally got…
Two steps forward, one step back
It has been a crazy 5 weeks of ups and downs. We kicked off February with getting the lot staked and having the forester mark all of the trees that need to come down to create a defensible space around our property for firefighters. It felt like we were making real progress. Then we started…
This is where the house will be built
We had Evergreen Surveying come out to our lot to stake the corners of the house in preparation for the forester to mark the trees that need to be removed. It was exciting to finally see where the house will actually be built on the lot. We’ve always known the general area and had a…
Foundation surprise
Just on the heels of the good news that our appraisal came in where it needed to be, I received an email about an issue with our foundation walls from the engineers. It turns out, the way the house was placed on the lot was going to require a 15 foot foundation wall in one…