The Beginning...sorta

Snow in the Deep South! Are you kidding me?!? Unfortunately not. More weather delays (which I will touch on shortly), so I have decided to track my project via blog and this website during these snowy days and beyond.

Pardon the length of this first entry, but I need to catch everyone up to date...

This project has been in the planning since August 2009. Not a very long time, I’ll grant you, but there it is. My wife and I had been talking about building a place for our growing family for a short time. In August we decided to put our condo in Huntsville, Alabama up for sale and begin planning.

Now what is the saying about the plans of mice and men?

Anywho...we figured with the economy in shambles, and the crappy housing market it would take several months for our condo to sell. One week...ONE WEEK later it is sold.

LESSON 1 - Unexpected things happen.

So we’re off and running...soon to be homeless, no definitive plans, and no property to build on (though we had been looking, so we weren’t totally without ideas).

We began an aggressive property search and within a few days had settled on a beautiful 11 acre piece of heaven in Prospect, Tennessee. We closed on our condo sale at the end of August, and closed on our raw land in the middle of September. Whew! A place to go and grow...

Within a couple of weeks I had pretty much hammered out my design and am ready to get out to the property and start working. Then came the October rains.

LESSON 2 - Weather is unpredictable.

I think it rained every single day in October. The weather folks said this October was the wettest in recorded history. Are you kidding me?!? I went out to the land several times and piddled around cleaning up trash, moving rock (by hand no less...did I mention I am 43! Idiot.). Then I came to my senses and bought a Yanmar 2610D tractor with front-end loader. AWESOME! I love my tractor.The rain continued.

It got a little better in November. I started having the drive (or road) put in. This is one of the few areas I had someone else do the work. However, it rained about every other week so it basically took two months to get the drive in. 1100 feet of chirt, and 2 inch crushed limestone base over 2 running springs. It is absolutely beautiful, but a nightmare trying to prep it for a building site road.