Time for pictures

As most of the process up to this point has not really lent itself to pictures, this blog has been a little wordy. But now we're moving:





Those are from the top of our mostly roughed-in driveway (taken just below the switchback - it's about 1400 feet from the county road at the bottom, and another 200 feet after the switchback up to the homesite). The second pic really gives a sense of how far, and high, it is from the road below.

This road is the most difficult part of this project, I think (of course we haven't had to do anything else yet). It's expensive, it needs to accommodate a 65' long trailer (and a 180 degree turn at that), and it is really big. You don't realize how much you're going to really disturb the land, and how different it's going to look, until it actually happens. This is what the switchback looks like right now:





All the excavators and contractors we've talked to have emphasized how important it is that a road be wide enough that "it can breathe" - get enough sun and warmth that it can dry out when it's wet - and they told us that due to the slope we're going across we need to clear quite a bit just to get a wide enough surface for the road. Seems a little self-serving for them to say that, of course. But everybody on the business end of this project (the Res4 folks included) have consistently told us how strident clients are that nothing get disturbed and how far that is from the reality of construction. Our goal is to have a little house that feels like it's in the middle of the woods - we like that aesthetic enough that we're not even going to clear a site line from the house for a view. But we'll see how close we can get to that...I'll say some more about the realities of clearing the home site and setting a prefab house like this in the next post.

Here are some more pictures from yesterday - first of our boys getting into the spirit, and then the view from a possible hot tub location?!?