Driveway - Greenhouse - Camping

Phil, the dozer operator, is a master, he sculpted the driveway, and ditches perfect, without GPS.

The driveway is ready for additional culverts, a well overflow-pipe, trench in the power, and then the water supply before putting on the rock.

We also made quite an improvement to the greenhouse, Kayla and her boyfriend Mike came up for the weekend and did an outstanding job assembling the arches, and quite a few of the upper horizontal supports. Owens birthday party was Saturday evening, so we got lots done on the greenhouse early, I stayed to tie-in and plumb the arches and purlins. We put our RV down there for the summer, so we have a place to rest, and get out of the heat when necessary. D'Artagnon and I can get a bit more done, before needing more help.

We camped down there Saturday night, set up our two tents, called it quits at 9 didn't get to sleep til 4am because the neighbors were haveing a party with real loud music. Some ignorant drunks from the party, raided our camp, broke into the RV, (which no one slept in thankfully) we thought it was Kayla going in the RV, Kayla thought it was one of us.

Day 2

We finaly got the shed emptied, and moved down the fence row about a hundred feet. All together it was I think 6 trailer loads to completely empty the thing, as well as a slowly growing pile of junk we will deal with later.

You can see in one of the pictures our greenhouse going up, maybe even a few orange flags, that is the future home of the septic field, the white sticks between the camera and the greenhouse is the future site of our house.

Stage 1 First Days End

As day 1 progressed, the ditches get cleaned out, as does the brush and a few in-the-way scrub trees,

the muck gets pushed out to dry in the field, and the hilltop by the shed gets lowered about eight inches.

...

There comes with any endeavor unwanted troubles, our started as the dozer operator was digging into the middle of the would-be driveway, to put in a field-tile to get a pesky spring which had popped up there to drain out into the ditch... it wasn't a spring, it was an old clay tile no one knew was there, had to be at a minimum thirty years old, which had burst from the endless rains this year, and had percolated up to the surface. So he had to use a mini-excavator to follow the clay tile up the drive til he found some good strong pieces, and put in a small piece of pipe to vent it into the ditch then he closed up the trench, and began moving in more dirt... only an hour or two spent averting calamity, unfortunately it was only a couple hours into our first day.!.!.

Very wet, lots of water to deal with.

While the dozer operator was busy making a driveway, Mary and I cleaned out the shed, by moving all of its contents into a storage unit in town (seven miles away) The shed was in the way, both because it sits where the drive will be and it sits on a heap of dirt they will use to build-up the driveway base.

Quite abit of progress really for a first day.

Stage 1

We finally started on building our home, May 23, 2009!.!.! This will chronicle our building steps, from putting in the driveway, and greenhouse, to all the stages of building the house, i.e. foundation, walls, roof, radiant floors, etc. I will start by showing pictures of the site while various improvements progress.

Here we are starting on the Driveway, this is how it looked before the dozer started moving dirt. The land that we are building it on is rather wet, to say the least, as several springs run through here, a massive field tile empties at the bend, as well as the drainage from road ditches to the south, the various hills in the area, and when the local river floods, it backs up in here too.

Then there are the unseen problems... more later.