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The Dirt

June 5, 2014Uncategorizeddaviddurkin6 View all 2 comments

While the house will be rustic, we are planning to equip it with modern amenities including electricity, water, high speed internet, and indoor plumbing. The first three don’t pose a problem. Indoor plumbing, however, requires us to look outside, at the dirt.

As we described in “The Lot”, the house will be built on a slight grade, very near a much steeper grade. You may also have noticed some rocks on the ground in some of the pictures. Both of these things, the grade and the rocks, make it challenging, or impossible, to install a septic field. No septic means no house, so let’s figure this out.

There’s a few types of soil on the lot:

Evard-this is good soil for septic

Ashe-this is too rocky

Chestnut-there’s not much of this, but it’s not suitable for septic either, and it’s too close to the stream.

Thunder-this is the bottom of the valley, where there’s a small stream, so we obviously can’t do anything there, but it’s a cool name.

The lot is outlined in green above, and the house site is marked by a grey rectangle. If you look closely, you can see the types of soil. Our challenges are: everything below the house is too steep. The septic field requires evard soil, which is only present near the top of the lot adjacent to the road, and right next to the house along the property line. To have enough space, the septic has to be by the road, so will be significantly more expensive than it normally would be. You can see an ideal scenario on the lot to the right, where the house site sits right in the middle of a nice big chunk of evard soil. We worked with the developer to offset some of this cost, as the challenges would be present for anyone that buys the lot.

You can also get a good idea of the topography of the lot with the elevation lines on this survey. The driveway follows right along the edge of the area labeled as ashe soil.

We were fortunate that all of the soil work for the lots in the subdivision was already completed and filed with the county (Gilmer). Within 10 minutes of calling, I had everything from the county that was filed. This somewhat makes up for the fact that they’re only open 2 hours a day. Once you know when to call, they’re quite helpful!

What We’re Building

June 2, 2014Uncategorizeddaviddurkin6 Leave a comment

The house will be a 1500 square foot 1 1/2 story rustic house. There will be 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and a full walkout basement with an additional bedroom and bathroom. There will also be a large porch with a fireplace, which apparently when it’s in the mountains is called a “party porch”. Here’s one on another house being built by our builder:

We’re also using and board and batten on the outside chimney. The rest of the exterior will be log and cedar shake. Log like the bottom of this:

And cedar shake like the top of this:

The lot is a 3.66 acre, rectangular parcel with 200′ of frontage on the Ellijay river. The top of the lot runs along a ridge, which eventually drops off down to the river. The house will be built at the edge of this slope, providing visibility to the river while remaining high enough on the ridge for a longer view to the mountains.

The lot is in a subdivision of 19 lots which are all 3.5 to 6+acres in Cherry Log. Cherry Log is between Ellijay and Blue Ridge, so it’s close to the lake (Lake Blue Ridge), the Benton Mackeye Trail, and the “downtowns” of both Ellijay and Blue Ridge (really a single main street, but lots of restaurants and shopping). It’s 60 miles from where we live currently and is consistently a 1:25 drive. For perspective, it is 97 miles north of the Atlanta Airport, which google puts at a 1:33 drive (all highway, our drive is not).

The entrance to the subdivision is 1.7 miles off of the “4-laner” (GA 515) on a decent gravel road. After passing a couple of farms, you come up to the gate:

There’s a farmhouse just inside the gate to the left, and everything to the right is community space that runs up to the river. They built an interesting, but not really functional, community building, which you’ll pass as you head up the road to our lot (straight in the picture). There’s a couple of lots on the road to the right as well. These are flat and right along the river. Everything else is up the hill.

You’ll take the road about a half mile up the hill on a nice gravel road.

At the top of the hill, the driveway is on the left. The driveway is a gradual slope down towards the house site, with a valley off to the right.

This is looking up to the road about half way down to the house:

This is the valley to the right of the driveway:

This is the view from the bottom of the house site, so what you’ll see coming out of the basement.The view to the river will be opened up as trees come out to make room for the house. Right now, you can just barely see it through the trees.

There’s a path from the house down the river already, although it’s a bit steep.

It’s worth the trip, though, as there’s 200′ of level river front to enjoy this:

We picked this lot for a few reasons. We narrowed it down to riverfront lots first, which gave us a handful of options. One of them was down near the entrance, and we wanted to be on top of the hill, so we ruled that one out. We walked each of the lots to see their river front, where the house would go, what the view would be, and how difficult it would be to build. The house site for this lot sits on the east side of the ridge, and we noticed that there’s a really nice sunset over the mountain to the east. It also provides a clear view down to the river. We also like the lot next to this, but picked this one for what we think will be a better east-facing view. I also liked the valley along the driveway, as it’s a nice view on its own.