Week 4: A clean slate (of dirt)

Since you last heard from us our excavators have been busy clearing the land where the house will be going up. Unfortunately for us, it's been a rainy few weeks, so that's delayed this stage a bit.


The usual viewpoint has this big pile of roots in front of it at the moment.


This is from the same general direction, though, so you can see that the hillside is now cleared away. The whole area from the current "driveway" to the tree fence will be level when this is done (except holes where the house foundations will be). The elevation will be in between the top of the wall and the current driveway elevation, so some parts will be lowered and others raised up.


Here's another view looking straight up the hill. You can see the tree save fence at the top, about where the top of the retaining wall will be.


The intrepid backhoe, responsible for much of this hard work.

Week 2: Tree Hugging

Here the view at the start of week 2. A mud mat has been installed at the driveway entrance. (Think a large doormat for vehicles, that keeps the trucks from making the road all muddy at the entrance). There are several trees within the construction area which we want to preserve during the construction process. These have additional silt fences to protect them from dirt during the construction process as well as an orange tree protection fence to keep them visible and safe.


The surveyors were out to fine tune the staking positions (which were originally placed by the architect). The wood posts are the old stakes, the orange flags are the new. The first set were for a general sense of where the house would sit on the site. Now they will be accurate enough to use for the actual construction process.



This is an approximation of one of the decks on the guest house. Our architect constructed it out of bamboo, somehow managing to drive from Asheville and up curvy mountain roads with 26 feet pieces of bamboo strapped to the top of the car. It's there to show the relationship between it and the smaller of the two retaining walls (the one that will be holding the end of our driveway in). The architectural review committee for Creston is concerned that it will be visible from the road below our site. We (as well as our architect, landscape architect, and others) have been attempting to convince them their concerns are unfounded. As we're attempting to demonstrate here, the one direction that you may be able to catch a glimpse of the wall from will be obscured by the house.


The same bamboo structure, with Melanie included for scale, so you can see just how tall it is.

Week 1: Let's get this party started!

We've begun! We are going to take a photo at the end of each week to show how everything is progressing. Here is our first one...



and some of our improvements...

one is our lovely new toilet



The other is the silt fence, which protects the site and it's flora from erosion, as well as preventing dirt from the construction from running off of our site to the road below or onto other sites. Here are the materials we started out the week with (you can still see some snow from last weekend).

Posts for Silt Fence



Plastic barrier for Silt Fence



Here you can see the fence in place at one edge of our site.



Here you can see some of the bottom of the fence from the road below our site, but even better is the amazing mountain laurel.



This weekend Melanie and I installed the permit box (a plastic thing that you store the permits and plans in) and looked at some paint samples we made. It was in the 70s, quite a change from last weekend!

Here's a cool looking rock outcropping on the road below our site.



A view of the mountains from the wooden swing up Creston Drive. The snow has mostly melted at this point.



This week has been nuts, but we will post a more informative one next week.