Swimming in the river

June 15, 2014Uncategorizeddaviddurkin6 Leave a comment

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.

Floor Plan

June 9, 2014Uncategorizeddaviddurkin6 Leave a comment

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!

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.