We’re about 2 weeks behind on updates, so a few will follow. I’ll break them up so you can actually see the progression.

We needed somewhere to put all of the wood for framing, so the driveway area in front of the house had to be expanded.

This is nice and flat. It ended up being even more space then you see here.

Before the slab goes in, you need a gravel layer below it. You can also see where the basement bathroom (future) will be.

Basement from the other side, pre-slab.

Here’s our beautiful basement slab. This is a nice piece of concrete. 

Looking out over the left side of the house.

Here you can see the awesome flat space in front of the house. This makes life easier for the builders, as they have somewhere to put materials, park, and also somewhere flat to work. It wasn’t cheap to get the rock taken out to do this, but it’s useful now and will provide a nice area in front of the porch when the house is done rather than stepping off the porch into an embankment.

The basement is fully framed and you can walk on the main floor now. This also gives you some scale of the area in front of the house that they leveled off. That dog is not Rocky, but apparently it can climb ladders!

I can’t leave you without a “view” picture, so here you go. This is from the typical spot “at the front door”. Just wait until you see what this looks like from 32′ forward!

A few more pictures to add, also from last weekend.

The burn pile continues to grow, although this should be the tallest it gets. Rocky and guest blogger  are providing scale.

We also walked to the other side of the ravine/valley to see how visible the house will be from the other side. You can see the foundation walls in the middle of the picture. We would be looking at the back right corner here. We’re about 300′ away here. From this angle, the house really appears to be perched on a cliff, as you can see the hill drop off all around it.

When we arrive, we learned that we were the cause of some heavy traffic in River Escape. These trucks are loaded up with the concrete forms that were used for the foundation.

The drive has its first layer of gravel. There’s loose rock from the site work under that as a base, so hopefully this will carry us through most of the build.

With an excessively large septic system (no one will ever have to worry about upgrading it…ever, even if they put 2 bedrooms in the basement), we had some concern about the effect of all of that digging. The septic field is to the left of the driveway in the picture, and as you can see, once you get halfway down the drive and look back, everything looks good. There will be some short grass seeded under there as ground cover, but so far it turned out better than expected (or feared).

This will be the side of the house you see when you drive up, so I’m more happy now with the decision to wrap the porch around this side. I think it will look great.

This is the view from the “front door”. This gives you some idea of the elevation, and we’re now realizing that the view from the second floor will be of the tree tops. This should be pretty cool.

Left front and side. We’ve ended up with a small flat area off the basement on this side. It would make a nice patio, so we’ll be adding another door out of the basement.

Now you’re standing under the side porch looking across the basement. This gives us an idea of how “daylight” this basement will be. I think even the basement is going to make you feel like you’re in the trees!

Builder Tim, his son, and super-agent Chase spend the better part of a day clearing more undergrowth between the house and the river. The view keeps getting better.

If you’re wondering, which I’m sure you are, there are 2 houses within ear-shot of our driveway. One was completed last fall and is used as a weekend house, and the other is currently nearing completion awaiting a buyer.

The new house is technically across the street, but you can’t see it unless you walk up or down the road a little bit. It’s almost complete, having been under construction since June. It has nearly identical square footage as we’re building, but is set up differently. It has a bedroom and bath on each level (basement, main, upper). Although it doesn’t have the riverfront, it does have a pretty awesome view over the valley. If you want to see actual pictures of it, you can see them here, this is just the view of it from the road. It’s currently for sale for $369,900 if you decide you must have it.

The other “neighbor” is around the bend. Their house is built on the very top of the ridge and has the best view from anywhere in the neighborhood. It’s a weekend house, and is a little bit smaller than the others (all 3 of us that exist) with about 1400 feet- it’s a 2 bed/2bath with everything on 1 level. It’s not set back from the road, but that was a necessity to build on the top of the ridge, and traffic noise isn’t a factor as there’s only 3 lots on the road past it. Had this been for sale, and less expensive when we were looking, it would have been at the top of our list.

After asking me if I would like to “guest post” on the house blog, Dave then had second thoughts, asking me “Wait, are you funny enough?”

We went to Blue Ridge Saturday to check on the house. Reports were that the foundation was done and basement walls were up. We were interested to see the progress because Blue Ridge had received 5 inches of rain over two days the week before. 

The progress did not disappoint! Here are a few pictures of the house so far.

The basement ceiling is about 10 feet, and will be able to have windows on three sides! This is going to be an extremely well lit basement! No dungeons here!

Now because this is a guest post and you get my perspective today, I will share the most exciting part of the visit for me! 

We had visitors!! I’m pretty sure these are only dog prints (not Rocky because they’re hardened in the concrete) but I’d like to think they are from a wild coyote and her baby cubs or a mountain lion! (Dave: I think they’re actually from a kitten.)

My parents are coming to visit next weekend and we are super excited to show them the progress on the house. The plan is to head into Blue Ridge and get some ice cream as well. Hopefully the mountain view, sound of the Ellijay River from the house and the quaint mountain town will make them want to move here!…

Happy house building!

Brittany

We’re moving earth! With all permits in hand, and the ground nice and dry, we’re underway! I know you’ve been holding your breath for the last month wondering where we went. Did they fall into the river? Did they give up? Did they just decide to dig a cave and move in? Well, stop holding your breath, the suspense is over.

Extreme Makeover, woods edition:

Before:

The big reveal (after). 

The second picture is taken from almost the exact same spot. The exact spot would require levitation, or a drone, so this is as good as you’re going to get. If you need proof, there’s 2 trees in the middle that are very clearly in both pictures. I promise.

To get the machines, trucks, and eventually our yuppie city cars down the driveway, Builder Tim has leveled the road off quite a bit. The driveway now turns slightly left instead of dropping straight down the hill. With the angle of the house, this will have you drive right up to the front door, and keeps the driveway nearly level, which is a feat.

Here’s the end of the driveway. The driveway curves to the upper left where Tim is working. The original slope of the driveway followed the tracks on the bottom right, so you can see how much elevation change was cut out. From this angle, you’d be looking at the front right corner of the house, and the side porch would be hanging out over the lower road.

Now you’re standing on the front porch. What you can’t see in this picture is the mountain peak that is dead ahead through the tress. We need to get the “fancy camera” up there and get a good picture. You can also see the river down below, but again, the human eye is a bit better than my phone’s camera. Once the foundation is in, we’ll have some trees trimmed to open up the view a little bit, and we’re going to clear some of the underbrush to get a cleaner line to the river.

For reference, the basement walls will be 9′, so that hole is pretty deep.

This is from the left side of the house. The previous picture was taken from the middle-right of this one. Tim is clearing out the loose dirt and moving it up to the fill the driveway. it’s a much “squarer” hole in person even though it looks kind of rough in these pictures.

Now I’m standing at the far end of The Pit looking back towards the house.I’m about 15′ lower than where I started.

If you’re wondering where all of the trees went, here you go. I know what you’re thinking; “I get a pile that big when I cut my grass every week”. Now take a look at the black silt fence for scale. That’s a giant pile! Once the clearing is done, all of that will be burned on-site. The bigger trees have been removed, although there was only a handful taken out. 

At this point, I need to give props to the builder, Tim Miller, and our super agent Chase McHan (www.nathanfitts.com), who was actually knocking trees down with Tim this weekend. if you know anything of our history with real estate agents, I’m a tough sell, but Chase is awesome. We’ll give an Ode To Chase at some point, but for now, we just owe to Chase because he’s kept this thing moving.

Next up:

-Finishing The Pit

-Septic drain field in Wednesday+

-Foundation Footers in on Friday

-Foundation walls in on Monday

 We finally got the septic permit this morning! Good news is that we can build up to 4 bedrooms. The bad news is that we forgot to site the well on the site plan…oops. Fortunately, the location we’re planning on for the well is safely clear of the septic field, so it’s not a problem. This just means that the septic has to be installed prior to the well, which is fine as these 2 things can happen independently of the rest of the work.

After our initial permit application was not approved, we enlisted Kirk Hall of Riverbend soil consulting to do a site plan for the septic system. Kirk did the previous soil work, so was familiar with the lots. He’s come back with a colorful picture that should result in a permit.

The top right shows the primary drain field and the “repair” drain field. To receive a permit, there needs to be space for both a primary field and a secondary field in case something goes wrong with the first one. In the picture, the house is labeled in green, and the drain fields are the blue parallel lines to the right.

If you’re curious, for a 4 bedroom permit, Gilmer County requires a 1000 gallon septic tank, 440′ of drain line, and a 1320 square foot drain field. Then you need to show the ability to do that twice while still not breaking any rules. This includes setbacks from currently undeveloped property lines, culverts, rivers, wells, and streams.

This permit is the most difficult to get, so once it’s in hand, we should really get rolling!

Very little progress to report. In 3 weeks, we’ve applied for the septic permit, ordered a site survey, found a really big tree, and fixed a problem with the title.

We applied for the septic permit 2 weeks ago, and that’s resulted in having to have a full site plan done. It didn’t help that we sent a plan with 5 bedrooms to the county instead of 4. The original plan for the basement looked like this (original being the stock plan we started with), with 2 bedrooms, a bathroom, and a den.

As an aside, I don’t understand why that word (“den”) still exists a name for a room. I’ll explore that later, but for now, you just need to know that I eliminated the “den” and a bedroom so now we have the aptly named “game room”. Yes, it will house games. Fun ones like Jumbo Jenga, a pool table, and even a TV to watch…games.

Quotes to finish the basement were very high, so I think this may be something I tackle. The extra bedroom and space would significantly increase resale (about 15%), but would have an even large impact on rental rates. There are not a ton of 4 bedroom houses available to rent in the area, and they rent for $250+ a night compared to the $150-$175 for 2-3 bedrooms. Over 150 nights a year, that’s a huge difference.

As of now, I’m planning to use the same tongue and groove from upstairs for the basement was and doing a stained concrete floor for the game room with carpet in the bedroom. This would be the only carpet in the house, so maybe I’ll match the upstairs wood. If you doubt the stained concrete:

So the first one is a barn, but it proves how awesome the concrete looks with wood. The second one is a kitchen. For the northerners, I’ll remind you that it doesn’t get quite as cold down here, and the concrete will be nice and cool in the summer.

With that sidebar taken care of, I have to introduce you to the largest tree in River Escape.

I also stood next to it and is it wider than my arm is long, so we’re thinking it’s about 40″ across. If it were straight, it would be worth some $$, but it’s a scoliosis tree, so it’s a bit wavy. The surprising thing about this tree is that we’ve walked by it about 10 times before and had never noticed it.

This is the view from the driveway, with the giant tree (this tree needs a name…) on the right. It’s far enough away that it looks the same size as all of the normal trees, but it’s actually about 2x as big. I want this tree to stay, but if they need to take it out for the septic dig, we will find a way to make use of it in the house.

Finally, we settled an issue with the title. When we received the title paperwork a couple of weeks ago, there was a lien listed, showing that the lot was being used as collateral for money that was owed to the developer. I dug through all of our prior paperwork and there was nothing about this. After a few conversations with the lawyer (and waiting while the lawyer was on vacation, then off for the 4th of July), they figured out that the lien was from another tract, and the paragraph about it had pulled in from another document. I won’t admonish them for poor Microsoft Word hygiene, but it was a pretty big mistake. They sent an addendum this morning that deleted that paragraph, so it’s behind us now. Thus, my PSA today is to read every legal document because even your lawyer won’t, and keep your eyes open for giant trees right in front of your eyes!

The plans are out for bids, which means that hopefully we’ll be making minimal changes at this point. We had been going back and forth with the builder on the plans, and finally decided to go back to plans that we had seen a few weeks ago and just work with those.

We will be making a few small changes during the build, like moving the covered porch from the back of the house to side, but this is 99.5% of what we’ll build. I’m also not a fan of the round window in the front. I think it should be a square.

The design is from a timber and log design company called Moss Creek.  We’re on the very small side of what they do, but it’s fun to look at their site for ideas.

http://www.mosscreek.net/

Here’s the front elevation:

Here’s a color rendition of the front:

And here’s a similar one that was built in North Carolina. This one is reversed, but it does have a side covered porch. The exterior is also different than what we’re using. Where this one is board and batten, we’ll have log. So, our house will be more brown than this, and I don’t anticipate any red windows. I do give them points for keeping the stone piers on the porch square and not building “ugg boots” like the one you’ll see below. Square houses should have square piers, which also means they should have square windows. So just imagine this house mirrored, brown, and with a square window.

The rear elevation is exact, except the porch will be off the left.

Here’s the non-porch side.

This house, built somewhere up North, is oriented the same way as ours, and they also added a side covered porch. They lose points for the porch piers and siding, but it was a good effort.

The first floor has a half bath again. I toyed with opening up the entire space where there’s a 1/2 bath, laundry, and closet, but it ended up being an awkward amount of space that wasn’t very usable. I also thought about making this space an office, but the view would be up the hill towards the driveway. A window there would be the worst view in the house. This is relative, of course, but I think the basement will have a better spot with a view of the river. The loft will likely be a great spot, too.

The other option was using all of that space to make a massive bathroom. Our previous house had a bathroom and closet that were almost as large as our current apartment. I’m not exaggerating, the previous owners built an addition just for this bathroom. It was obnoxious and inefficient, and almost made me not buy the house in the first place. So, after that experience, we’ve opted to keep the bathroom a normal size. The second picture below is of the master bath in the one that was already built, and as you can see, it has plenty of space. I don’t think an average sized american would fit into the tub those people have, but I guess they were going for looks over function.

There were two things I wanted to work into this house that I finally figured out: a loft and barn doors. We found a way to do both with the second bedroom on the upper level. The room labeled “bedroom 3” below will be open to the great room, so it will be loft space. When all of our friends stay over, though, and we need to use it as a bedroom, there’s barn doors to close off the room for privacy.

Looking up from the great room, this is what the doors look like:

Here’s the loft with the doors open:

And the doors closed:

No updates on the house, but we did go to the lot today and got Rocky to at least walk in the river. The bank of the river drops 4-5 feet from the flat part, but there’s a little path, probably courtesy of some deer, that makes it easy to get down to the water.

Once you’re in the river, it’s a nice view:

We also started collecting rocks. We’re not exactly sure where these will end up, but we’ll need them for the path to river, the firepit, and they’ll be useful for landscaping right around the house. An advantage to the rocky soil is that we’ll have hundreds of nice rocks to use once they start digging for the foundation and finishing the grading. Make a trip to home depot and see how much a pallet of rocks costs, then stop laughing that I’m starting to pile them up. This also conjured up memories of “harvesting” rocks from the woods as a kid and bringing back carts full of rocks for my 10 cent/rock payday.

Also, we started thinking through how we’ll make a (walkable) path down to the river. There is a clearing now, but it’s way too steep, so we’re going to make some sort of step and switchback path.

We’re also going to build a firepit down here, as we have a nice chunk of flat ground (I’d say about 75′) before it starts to go uphill. The river is pretty loud down here, and we own the entire hill, so it’s about as private as you can get.

The first news is that the closing for the land is officially behind us. I assumed that we’d only have a few papers to sign since there’s no bank involved, but we hit 58 pages! Most of the bulk surrounded the subdivision, but there were some additional clauses due to the riverfront. Those include the county’s permanent right of way that extends 30′ from the edge of the river, and the riparian rights paragraphs explaining that we’re not allowed to take all of the river water from our downstream neighbors.

We’re currently iterating the floor plan, but it’s mostly baked at this point. The general layout is set (for today), we’re just nailing down windows and the layout of the kitchen and bathrooms.

The house will be 36′ wide and 28′ deep. It will have a full basement with a bathroom, 1 bedroom and a full bath on the main floor, and 1 bedroom with a full bath on the second floor. There will also be a small (10’x9′) loft on the second floor. Excluding the basement and small attic space, we’re at 1,412 square feet.

You can see the general layout below. Both of the bedrooms are fairly large; 14’x16′ on the first floor and 14’x15′ on the second floor. The great room is about 18×18. The kitchen and the dining area are both about 10’x10′.

Outside, there’s a small front porch, and a large covered side porch with an outdoor fireplace that is accessible through french doors from inside and a deck from the outside.

The orange highlights below are changes I made on the latest version. Closet and bathroom configurations are causing the holdup now, particularly downstairs. Initially, we did not want access to the bathroom from outside of the bedroom (with a bathroom for each bedroom, not sure it’s necessary), but then we changed our mind, so we’re working on the best way to do that. The configuration below is definitely not the answer, but  it at least has the pieces we need. The first floor bathroom won’t have a tub, just a walk-in shower. There will be a tub/shower in the upstairs bath. The original plan had a jacuzzi tub downstairs, but that’s been axed. The majority (ok, the great majority, say 90%) of houses in the area have outdoor hut tubs, so I feel it would be redundant. That money would go farther elsewhere.

As you can see, we’re still at the rough pencil (+blue pen and orange highlighter) phase!