In our free time

Being the good people that we are, we decided to help some very trusting friends of ours put in a new hardwood hickory floor. Good practice, anyway, right? Here are just a few shots of the completed project. I just hope our floors look this good when we're done with them.

Fill 'er up

Only 22 truck loads of fill later, and the lot -or at least the pad- is up to the desired elevation. Not much to look at yet, but at least it's starting to resemble a site where a house could go...if only we could get that trailer out of the way!

Up close and personal

Here is an up-close shot of the bulkhead. It consists of almost 30 4x6 posts every 8 feet, buried about 3-4 feet into the ground. The back of the lot needed to be brought up almost 30 inches, so from this tree back the retaining wall is built by 16 foot long 3 x 12 whalers, one stacked on top of another, with an occasional 3 x 8 underneath that. From this tree forward, we needed just one 3 x 12 whaler to build the property up to the correct elevation. We then tacked on filter fabric and a nice clean top board to finish the job.

Bring on the dirt!

Of course, the whole reason for the bulkhead is to hold in the dirt, so bring it on! Conveniently, some friends of ours down the street decided to dig a pool right about the time we were finishing the bulkhead. They brought in about 10 truck loads of fill, unfortunatley only about a third of what we needed in the end. But don't get us wrong, at $70 a truck load, we are most appreciative of the free kind of dirt!

Monte

About a month ago we started constructing a bulkhead -or retaining wall- around three sides of the property. Again, I have a strong feeling that the desire to do this ourselves was greatly influenced by the opportunity to involve heavy machinery. It took two long weekends to do this, and Monte was getting a little fed up, so Ian decided to spark his interest by including him in the "men's work".

The mini-excavator

Here is the reason that we saved the few trees we did. I can't believe that we don't have a picutre of Ian riding it! He had so much fun he almost flipped it twice!

Some specs of the lot

Here is another photo of the lot a little further into the demolition stage. It may or may not give you a better feel of what the lot looks like as a whole. To give you an idea, the lot is 60 x 100 and -believe it or not- not a bad size for the tiny little island of Clear Lake Shores. The house will sit to the side featured in this photo, approximately 30 feet off of the house that you see to the right.

Demolition begins...

It has been so long since we cut down the trees, this may be the best photo we have of the lot pre-construction. We had this great Ash tree (appropriately ;-) in the middle of where the driveway will sit, but after a survey or two it was decided that the tree was dying and would never survive the build. Unfortunately, this was the first of many we had to cut down to accomodate construction.

We were able to save a few trees by digging them up with a kubota tractor and replanting them. Although, I think that a big part of Ian's need to save the environment came from the idea of renting a tractor for the weekend.

Welcome to 211 Oak!

In the footsteps of our good friends Luke, Peggy and Noah, we have decided to create a blog. Now, don't get too excited, it is not for the same reason -being an addition to the family- at least not yet. But, we do want to share with all of you the progress of our first home! We bought the lot about a year ago and have finally decided to start building. Progress has been slow thus far but should start moving ahead now that we have a general site to post all development...I guess we'll see.