We Now Have A Solid Base to Build On

Yesterday the footings were poured. Wink and his crew did a fantastic job. Everything seems to be going fast now, and I hope it stays smooth sailing. The basement walls will be put in on Thursday. The back filling is also scheduled for Thursday. The logs will be delivered on the 19th of October. Anyone that wants to come and watch is more than welcome. In the picture with the cement truck shows the first cement going into the forms. There will be a walk out basement on the lake side. A steel beam was ordered on Monday at Mac's Steel in Rutland. I took a trip with the plans in the afternoon. Construction start date is October 21st. I will give a list of materials for the first floor decking to RK Miles Lumber when we get back from Washington on Tuesday. Keep looking for new updates!

Paul

We Are Officially started

The closing went well. It was not as exciting as you would think. There was only one other person besides Patti & I, the Lawyer for the bank. We visited the home site just after and talked to Jim Ploof. He said he would be finished shortly and Wink can start anytime he is ready. Hopefully everything will fall into place and we can get the house up and weather proof before the real bad weather comes. We now have the final building plans for the home. They will be posted soon! The bees had a great summer but because it was so dry, the fall honey was light. They are being prepared for the winter months. Hopefully they will survive the winter!

The trees that were taken down will be firewood, except some of the logs will be used in the house for the porch. Some of the stone and fill from the foundation was used along the sides of the road.

Paul

Exciting Ground Beaking News

After a long wait and extra problems the cellar was dug for the log home on Thursday the 4th of October. The closing is today at 2pm. the logs will be delivered on the 19th and construction will start on the 21st. The lay out of the footings was done on Thursday and will be ready for the foundation contractor ( Wink) today. I'll keep everyone updated when I can. I will be the General Contractor for the project.

Update

At this point I'm not sure when things will happen. We are still waiting for the bank to get there act together and finish the paperwork. We have been in contact just about every other day trying to get things moving. We still hope to break ground in October. My personal feelings is a Spring start. We will see!!. We have a long awaited 911 address which was also holding us up for the power supply to the property. The address is 59 Partridge Trail, Leicester, Vt. The town of Leicester had to send someone out to measure the property for the address and they are short handed. Now we are waiting for the engineer to show up from Verizon so the poles can go in. CVPS has already been notified. The people from Verizon said it could take a possible of 6-8 weeks for this type of work to be done. We are also worried about the winter rates that will come in November. Higher prices of a already high cost project is not good. We have sent the plans to the log home people so the final building plans can be drawn up. We still have a deliver date of October 12, but with no guarantee from anybody. The excavator and foundation people have been contacted. We have been working on all the details and costs for this adventure and we still seen to be treading water most of the time. We have been clearing land by the lake front. Jacques & Stacy came out and helped us work on some clearing. We had a good day and got allot of work accomplished. We started a rock wall on the property boundary which will be call the Jacques wall. When I contacted Verizon they gave us a phone number for our property 802 247-3926. It's kind of funny we have a New address with no house and a phone number with no phone. This is making progress!!? At this point our levels of stress have risen and our vision of a October start is looking like April.

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Driveway & House Clearing

To much of a surprise Patti & I returned to the lake and found that they did some more work on the property. The road has fine gravel to travel on and the location where the house will sit is clear. You can tell by the pictures alot has been cleared out. It is now possible to vision where the house will be. We are still waiting for the bank to get back to us. We had a meeting last Monday. They will determine how much we have to spend. We are still waiting for a estimate from a plumber. We were told again it was in the mail. John Hutchins the builder said we should have it by the end of the week. I'm not holding my breath!! I'm going to talk to a logging mill and find out if some of the logs can be used for flooring or lumber. Hopefully we can get something out of the wood except just fire wood.

Driveway Update

Driveway Update

Hello everyone!! Phase one of the driveway was completed on Saturday. We now have a road and a clearing to the Lake. The Lake is about 125' down. In one of the pictures you can see the clearing. The lake is just below. We now can drive to the site. There still needs allot of work to complete the project but they gave us a great start. The honey bees are still doing great. I just weighed the honey I took off the Russian hive and I'm shocked to say 64 lbs of honey. I can't believe the amount of honey taken from just one hive and only a month's work. I would dare say that this is going to be the best year for the bees since I've been working with them. In one of the pictures shows 1 of 14 frames taken off full of capped honey.

Lot's of Progress

Patti & I checked to see what they accomplished in one day. It appears to be about 300 ft of driveway completed. We are very happy with his quality of work and how quick he gets the job done. The drive way will continue into the wooded area and will turn around by the house. I also checked the bees and the Italian bees seemed to be agitated by something. It has been raining allot lately and it was kind of clear at the time I took this picture. I haven't taken any honey out of there hive yet because I took about 40 lbs from the Russian hive. I'll have better totals later. I took some time to go fishing today and caught this nice Large mouth Bass. I caught it on my frog plug after my second cast. My first cast he took a hit on the lure but missed. I managed to catch him anyways. More work will be done on the driveway tomorrow. Hopefully he will get alot of work done and get phase one completed soon. Keep looking for further updates.

Nothing Runs like a Deere

I bet you can tell I'm happy by my smile. I just couldn't wait to try out this bulldozer myself.

We Now Have A Driveway

The excavator started today. Jim Ploof and his crew from Ploof Excavating started building our driveway. It was pouring out most of the day but they started putting gravel in for fill, and will be cutting down some trees. They will only be working a few day's to complete a small portion of the project. They will come at a later date when we get the construction loan to finish the work. Here are a few of today's pictures of this morning. It rained so much we didn't stay so we don't have the afternoon work completed.