To make a long story short:
Now for the long story: The next 3 pictures capture the scene when last we spoke in early 2009. The house was occupied but the excavation spoils still surrounded it. We could not do the final grading until the old house below the new house (that we lived in during construction) was out of the way; it's roof visible in right margin of first picture.
Getting that house out of the way was a bit of a hurdle, but in the meantime I dug yet another ditch - give a man a backhoe and you find out that ditches are the job that needs doing! This time it was to run power to the barn.
We got completely moved out of the old house and cleaned it up. Our neighbor Effie Peek nee Norton grew up in the house and she asked if she could bring her sisters up to see the place before we took it down which we were honored to oblige. After they spent the afternoon having something of a family reunion we heard from another neighbor Ruby Lewis nee Hensley that she would like to visit also. Her dad and brother built the house using earnings from Kentucky coal mining in the 1930's. She brought her older sister Zola - shown in the photo below - who told tales of how much work was required of her, the oldest daughter, to help with the younger kids and help her dad and brother with the farming. They were doing subsistence farming on these hills with mules which, as you can see, are almost too steep to hike up.
Finally in September 2009 George came to the rescue to help with the deconstruction of the old place.
Finding out what was in the walls was interesting! When people say something looks like a rats nest this is what they mean:
Where there are rodents there are rodent eaters. We uncovered quite a sizable skin shed by a Black Snake:
Then we came across it's owner.
Since I had doused it with chlorinated wash water I rinsed it off in the stream before releasing it. These snakes prey on rodents (good) and small birds (bad), but on the balance I like having them around.
Fiona came to visit George and enjoyed a evening by the fire.
The house was disassembled and all the useful wood was salvaged.
Pulling nails took quite a bit of time.
Getting the last piece down was pretty easy from a safe distance:
Here are three slide shows of demolition progress:
Boy! did my body hurt after working on that roof. We put some of the unusable but clean debris against the hillside then started moving the excavation dirt to cover it
Getting that hillock outside the window gone was satisfying indeed.
The better wood - mostly American Chestnut - "high value stuff" as Effie's husband Clifton likes to say - was moved to the lower barn to be stored.
George celebrated his 24th birthday with us - that meal looks mighty good!
Besides working on the demolition George did some of his favorite kind of yard work - creating a space next to the creek and fashioning a little waterfall.
After pushing the hillock down we still had a pretty steep grade right in front of the house and a big pile of dirt on the far side of it. So we put in a call to Earl Norton - our local heavy machine operator - to do the real grading. We saved & transplanted some of the old native plants that were around the house so that the bulldozer could work freely.
And in the process decided to extend the culvert & drains so that the smoothed-out part of the yard would be bigger.
Unfortunately the soil in that pile was quite wet so Earl couldn't finish the job but had to spread it out and let it solidify a bit. While Earl was bulldozing George used a chainsaw and materials from the old house to build a new stout bridge across the creek.
Winter 2009-2010. You can see Earl's bulldozer just left of center in this shot:
It stayed there all winter. The thing about winter that is nice around here, besides the cold, is that you can actually see things.
As you can see from above, raw soil tends to go downhill. As soon as it dried out in the Spring I got Earl to come back up and finish. In the background you can see the netted-straw matting I laid down and "stapled" with 6 inch sod-staples after spreading grass seed. This stuff is great to hold the soil.
All done at last.
We saved all the flat rocks we came across and used them to form a walkway; that first beauty was used as a threshold on the old house too.
The bulldozer did a great job compacting the soil, then I did a great job uncompacting it so that the grass would be healthy:
The little bathroom that we built for use during our initial residency was now something of an eyesore. So we got Clifton to come up with his John Deere and winch to move it.
You'd think from this shot that I measured the driveway before building the bathroom but it was just luck. The final resting place - now it's an appendage to the lower barn.
I came across a massive stone when digging yet another ditch (to supply power to the lower barn) and found that this stone could be split like slate - which was a good thing because otherwise I would never have been able to get it out of the way. While Clifton had his tractor up there, he used its forks to move and help place those slices to start the outside patio. This corner rock was a thing of beauty:
As spring turned to summer I decided to terrace the steeper part of the hill. The green stuff behind the terrace is that straw-matted section shown with the bulldozer in early spring above - as you can see it works good!
Here lies some of the material from the old house waiting for the day it will be needed.
A view of the top section all tilled and ready for seeding:
Seeding and watering it one section at a time through June:
I didn't use the straw mats where the soil was pretty level, but everywhere there was slope it got installed:
Every lawn needs a lawnmower. The 34-horse GizMow shown with the attractive model below is a whole-hog purchase. Fifteen minutes is about all you need to spend on this puppy; however you have to wait for a dry spell since wet grass and that kind of weight don't mix well.
That was about as much of that as I could take for a year. In the gardening domain I had a decent crop of potatoes:
And Charla's flowers (many transplated from Vashon Island) continue to thrive:
Summer 2010: George and Fiona got married in California. This is from the recital dinner:
The nicest time of the year up here:
We had so much produce from the garden that we decided to buy a chest freezer. We put in on the back porch then built a little enclosure for it. Also by now we had grown tired of having garbage cans in front of the house so I built a little garbage-and-recyling storage area. The doors are made from the salvaged interior siding of the old house.
And we got another construction loose end tied up: I got back to pestering Dennis Campbell who has a cabinet shop a couple of miles from here to finish the custom cabinet doors. He used wood we brought from Vashon and Doug Fir plywood we shipped to ourselves from California so it matches the trim and other interior doors. We did applied the oil-based finished (he wisely refuses to work with that stuff) using the rig below:
Winter 2010-2011. A record setter in the snow department. I like the way the wind has shaped the drifts on top of the truck.
Sandy Bottom, the newest member of the household, wandered by in the autumn of 2010. He was surviving mostly on crickets. We suspect he was someone's inside cat because he has been spade and really thinks he belongs inside. However he lives outside now and has adjusted to it although you don't leave the door open in front of him.
Spring 2011 my sister's son Inigo came and together we worked on the last section of yard to get grass planted on it:
We grew some interesting finger potatoes this year:
Tasty but very small so they are a bit harder to harvest. At the end of 2011 I got back on the stick and built a carport behind the house, again using materials salvaged from the old house:
I used the subfloor boards for the roof deck which already had 45 degree cuts on them which gives a decorative-if-overbuilt look:
So that's about it for this construction blog. We still have big ideas including building a simple artist's studio perched up the hill and replacing the barn close to the house with a garage/shop/office. Progress is going to be slow unless I can find Steve and get him to work for me again.
