It looks like we may be excavating the building site and pouring part of our foundation within a few weeks! This will be the third time we have ripped open the earth, and each time feels traumatic when the bulldozers and backhoes have at it. We had to dig into […]
Our house will be built of unmilled timbers, which we selected from our woods (see my post How to Peel Trees). Most of them have been peeled and are starting to dry before they will be felled this winter. Some are too tall to peel until they are felled. It’s […]
“Hey!” we said. (Watch out for brilliant ideas – they always turn out to be a lot of work.) “While Bruce is here excavating for our septic system, let’s ask him to move a few trees planted by the previous owner, and we can make our future garden plot bigger.” […]
This past week when Doug was mowing around a mound of topsoil to make it more accessible for the excavator, he was stung painfully. We warned the men working on our septic system, but though they dug up and moved that mound, they encountered no bees. Just a few days […]
We are ready to flush our toilet, except that we don’t have one yet. That has to wait till the house is built next summer. However, our drainfield has been planned, approved, laid in, and seeded over. And last week a super-duper septic tank was added to the project. I […]
We are jump-starting next year’s house building project by getting the septic system done this fall. This way we will have good, thick plant cover by the winter of 2012 when we start using it. In places like Wisconsin and Minnesota one has to take care to keep good plant […]
We fell in love with our hilly land, but before we bought it, we were advised to have a soil evaluation report a.k.a. perk test done to see if we would be able to build an at-grade septic system instead of a mound system for our future (now not so […]
We bought our land the weekend before Thanksgiving, and the next summer I walked around with big eyes watching to see what would come up. In a handful of places I saw a single tall, plant. On the edge of a meadow. By the side of our main trail where […]
We’ve been spending about half our time out on our land this summer fighting invasives, finishing the barn and preparing to build a house next year. On a rainy day last week, I opened the door to the greenhouse, which had some overgrown herbs I intended to clear out. I […]
We came across some rough-sawn elm cut to 5/4″ that we thought would work well to make the loft floor in the barn, but it turned out to be only about half the needed number of board feet. Then a good friend kindly offered us some old white oak timbers […]
Digging in the Driftless 