The Driveway Continues

Bruce and I were out this evening surveying the rest of the retaining walls and the home site location. Actually, Bruce was surveying and I was following him around hammering in the stakes. He uses a sweet GPS unit that makes for a quick job of things. It really gives us a good sense of how things will lay out. Tomorrow, we have a geotechnical engineer coming out to do an evaluation of the soils. This is one of things required by the civil engineer who did the plans and the county won't release the building permit without the report. It could turn out for the good for us though because as we have worked up the driveway, we have discovered about 1/3 of it is very rocky and we will find out from her if it needs to be retained. If all goes well and we don't have to retain that section, it could save us some money. Everyone cross your fingers. Anyway, enjoy the photos!

This will be our view!!!!

Driveway

This is about a weeks worth of excavation on the driveway. We are finally substantially underway! We will be putting a large boulder retaining wall on the left hand side of the driveway. It should look real nice. I anticipate that they will begin to put that in place over the next couple of weeks. We'll keep you posted as we get further up the hill.

Joe Dworshak

Last weekend we went down to the Dworshak Reservoir for some fishing and to enjoy the 90 plus degree weather. Heidi had a program in Lewiston so Elise and I tagged along and stayed with Mom at the new Best Western in Orofino below Dworshak. It was fun! You wouldn't believe that the water temp in the Reservoir was 75 degrees! For June that is incredible. The next day, we traveled up to the St. Joe to stay with my parents at the Joe property. We had a lot of fun just hanging out, went for a dinner cruise and almost sunk my boat, and had lots of good drink and food. Too much fun!

Memorial Day Weekend

1. On a hike to Settler's Cedar Grove near Murray, ID.
2. Dad and Elise roasting a marshmallow.
3. Scrap and Elise checking out some worms for the days fishing.

Mom was there too but no pictures showed up with her in them!!!! We had lots of friends come up and despite the rainy weather, we had a good time. We also went to the Pritchard Tavern for the first time and discovered that it was a real gem. The food was good, service was good, and the Olympia's were cold!

Back on track!

Ok! We have got the redesign completed. The reason that we went back to the drawing board was because the original plan would have absolutely destroyed the hillside. We did not want that so we decided to retain the entire driveway with large boulders. None of these decisions are easy because of the cost involved but we did not want to ruin what had inspired this project in the first place. We had quite a bit of a wait but hopefully our patience will pay off and things will look good when we're all done. We're excited that things are moving forward again. Today I drove out after work and checked things out. Our builder was out on the property today putting in the stormwater controls and by the beginning of next week, actual construction of the driveway will begin. We are really happy to be back on track again.