Excavation Update

Here's a look at the home pad and driveway. As you can see it has been quite an undertaking. We are getting ready to pour the foundation for the house. Where Heidi and Elise are standing now will be the future basement just below the living room.



The driveway looking up toward the home site. It is at a 10% grade.



This is the slash pile that I foolishly tried to chip with a large rental chipper one beautiful 105 degree summer afternoon. As you can see, I didn't get very far.



This road was raised approximately 3 feet all from materials taken from our excavation! The neighbor wanted to raise the road bed to match the future Fernan Lake Road improvement and gladly took the material we needed to remove. Worked out pretty well for the both of us.



Elise likes it! She even got a new hairdo and purse to mark the occasion!

Camping Kids

Elise, Roslyn, and Brennan had a lot of fun up at the river the other weekend checking out worms and crawdads!

It's been busy. We have been doing a lot of this lately and so I have been neglecting the updates. We've been spending a lot of time up on the St. Joe and CDA Rivers. It's been hot! More to come!

Tiki Tiki

Over the last two weekends, Holmes, myself, and various other assistants (Heidi, Mom, Uncle Doug, Aunt Ilene, Keith, Hayden, Logan, Becky, Randy, Mami) constructed a Tiki bar at the St. Joe river property. It turned out to be a beauty. It's located facing the river at the right hand end of the deck. We broke it in with a few cocktails the other night!

The Official T-shirt

Oink! Here is a link to get yourself one of the official t-shirts for the St. Joe Smack Down River Ribs Cook Off! Just click here and you will be directed to a site where you can purchase the shirt.

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.