A short visit with Dakota

After we left the building site, we stopped by Suzi and Ed's place to meet Dakota and the other horses.  Suzi was riding Dakota down in her Horse Rink and came up to meet us.

Here Mia is giving another of the horses some carrots, and as we can see in the last picture, Dakota really, really want's his share of carrot as well, and is letting Mia know it with a gentle nose nudge.

Clearing the site has started

Grace and Mia visited us this weekend, so we took a ride up to Kent to meet Wes and see how the clearing was going.  Here's a group shot at the top of the hill.   This is after I made Grace, Mia and Kim climb through the mud to get to a 'better' vantage point.  Even though I didn't admit it to them at the time, it was the same view they could see from the other side of the muddy ravine I made them go through .... oh well ...

Lee, from Rock On was hampered a bit last week with the rain and mud, but is making steady progress.   Unfortunately, as we thought, Lee discovered a lot of ledge on the site, and now we must blast.  The good thing is it might mean a full basement under the entire house (versus a partial full basement and a crawl space) and it will mean that we'll have some rock to use for retaining walls.

The really bad part about this blasting is that I won't be around for the next two weeks and wanted to see it.  I guess I can't put the project on hold, but I'm hoping someone can video the event for the blog.

Below is a shot of the clearing on top of the hill, minus the group shot.

And here is a picture of the type of equipment Lee and Rock On are using to clear things.  What I didn't get a picture of is the mountain of wood chips that we now have from the cleared trees.

 When we were leaving the site, we looked back and took this picture of some rock outcroppings that will be up near the house.  We'll be incorporating these into the lower patio.

Breaking Ground

Well, I think we are finally on our way. We asked Lee, the owner of Rock On Excavation LLC to start clearing our land as of Monday. Kim and I visited the site Saturday with Wes our architect, and I took the picture below of Lee, Kim, and Wes in front of the chipper that will leave us about 200-300 yards of wood chips when all the clearing is done.

We used to use about 9 yards of mulch every year in our yard in our old house and that seemed like a lot. In Kent, we plan on building a nice winding trail to Suzi and Ed's place next door in addition to using the chips as mulch around the house.

After we left the site, we went over to Suzi and Ed's house and got together with a few of our new Kent neighbors for dinner. What a great group of people. The more we come up to Kent, the more we look forward to living there.

Looking to get started

Kim and I met with Wes on Saturday to discuss the interior finish and the status of the various bids out to contractors.  For the interior finish, we agreed the following:

• The ceilings in the Great Room, Kitchen and Front Entrance are going to be wood.
• The walls in the Great Room are also going to be wood, probably some type of stained Barn Siding.
• The window trim, where the walls are wood, will be minimal and flush.  Actually I don't know what I'm talking about here and we agreed we needed to see this as I couldn't wrap my mind around what it would look like.
• The other rooms of the house would have sheet rock walls and ceilings with normal window trim.
• The walls on the Screened porch will be the house siding.
• All the stairs will have the same tread as the floors, probably oak, with the main staircase will have oak risers.  For the balusters on the main staircase we would like wrought iron, but only if we can get a look similar to the picture below.  If that proves too expensive (which is a good possibility), then we will investigate a rustic wood style for the balusters or perhaps some simpler wrought iron ones.

After we completed discussing the inside finish, we went over the status of the various bids.  Our focus is to get the project going, so we agreed to accept bids for the site work and the septic as we're comfortable with them. Wes is going to do some comparative analysis with a few of the companies that bid on the excavation, foundation, framing, siding, exterior trim and roofing as we'd like closure on those within the next two weeks.

We also agreed with Wes that we should start the zoning and then building permit process.

Kim and I decided to ask Country Carpenters to build our barn.  The plan is to get in the ground during March and have foundations for the house and barn complete by early May.  Once that happens, the framing can start for the house and we can have the Barn constructed.  If that all works out the Barn would be finished by late June.