A photographic tour

(You can click on any of the photos below for a closer view.)


Welcome to Creston!


Here's the entrance gate.


Just before the entrance to the development is this little burbling waterfall.


This is where everyone picks up their mail, just a little way up the road from the gate.


A little further up the mountain there is a roundabout with a gazebo and a fire pit in the middle.


In the foreground you can see the edge of the gazebo area. The road ahead leads up to our home site.


This is the entrance to our lot where our driveway will be eventually.


These are the outlines of the houses, staked on the site. The orange outline is the house. The yellow ones that you can barely see in this one, and see a little more of in the next, are the retaining wall.


Here you can see me up on the hill about where the top of the retaining wall will be.


This is the view out from our site looking north towards the mountains.


A close up from our "driveway" of Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the eastern mainland of North America at 6,684 ft.


Our well, under it's lovely and convincing faux rock cover. This will be replaced with a smaller, more realistic rock and we'll plant around it once construction is complete.


This is a public swing along one of the roads, a little bit past our site.


This is a stone table user for pagan... picnics.


This is the community center at the top of the site. In most developments, you find that the developers save the best sites for themselves. At Creston, the best spots are saved for community land. There are amazing views from the porch that wraps around three sides of this building.


Here is a view of the mountains from the community center.

It's really happening!

Everything is starting to speed up. We have our final plans ready. Signed by all the engineers and our architect. There are 58 pages in the set and we get chuckles from people when we hand them off. They think we have given them two sets accidentally. We also found out on Friday that our review board for the development has approved me to serve as our General Contractor. Woo hoo!

Last week was filled with meetings with mechanical contractors. We've decided to get the house Energy Star certified, so have been learning more about that process. Adam has been printing out sets of plans for all these meetings because we decided to save ourselves a bit of money and print and bind them ourselves. The cats have been a big help as you can imagine. Six sets down, maybe another six to go.

We have decided on most of our subs and by the end of this week, should know who we are hiring for our excavation and foundation work. We have a meeting with a "green" plumber we've been talking to this coming Friday. Then we need to get contracts signed with everyone and get the ball rolling.

Adam just printed out some gigantic calendars for me and I have taped them to our living room walls so we can start to track everything. Just coming up with a system for all of this has been challenging, but with the help of post-it notes and file folders, I think we're on our way. I have my mom's old Franklin Planner that I am going to attempt to use, but it may be too methodical for me. We'll see.

So now that we have our plans, septic permit, and soon our subs, our plan is to go to Marion (the county seat--about 45 minutes away) early next week and come back with our approved building permit. If everything works out, we could be getting started with our erosion control and tree save plan this month and break ground in early March. I've probably just jinxed us though.

Wish us luck!

Some Backstory.

Here are some artists renderings of the original floor plans we started with.

The guest house :

This has remained fairly close to the original in layout. The balcony you see here will be facing north, away from the road, in the general direction of Mount Mitchell. There has also been a lower level added with a studio area, that will be a daylit basement.

The main house:

This one has had much more far-reaching changes made. As with the guest house there has been a lower level added with an office, den, and some storage areas. Additionally there have been some fairly extensive changes to the room layouts on the main and upper floors. The balcony you can see on the left side no longer exists, and the garage below it has become a screened in porch. The exterior doesn't really look like this anymore! We made quite a few changes to both plans to make them work together and look like one, big house.

Retaining Wall

We have a super long retaining wall that gets up to 9' at its highest point. We were considering using boulders, but they are pricey and kind of look like a big pile of rocks with walls as high as ours. Charming for 2-3' walls though. There are some prefab concrete walls that people install for residential sites. One is called Redi-Rock, but it looks way to commercial to us. Then we found this cool system:



Here's one where the plants haven't totally taken over and you can actually see the wall:



They are engineered concrete blocks, but are more like hollow drawers where you put compacted soil and plants. With time, the plants fill out and you have a green wall. Should be a much nicer vista than a big wall of rocks. Plus it costs about a quarter the price of the Redi-Rock system.

We are really excited about our new garden walk from the driveway leading to the house. The planted wall will help it feel like an enclosed space. Given that we have such a wooded lot and that we don't intend to clear anymore than what we have to for the house, it will be so nice having a spot that is easily accessible for gardening. We will probably avoid too many edibles because of the bears! We'll have to do a bear post soon.