Night Photos

The moon has been so bright the last few night (not sure when the full moon is/was). And I should know since from my pillow, I can look straight up and see the moon shining through the trees in the window over my head.

When we got home from dinner/Lowes shopping last night, Matt noticed now pretty the sky was, so we got the camera and tripod out. This was around 10:30pm. Even with a few house lights on, it was so dark the auto-focus wouldn't work (lots of guess and check). I took close to 100 pictures. These were my favorites.

Lucy In the Creek! (and the flooded creek)

Last Sunday we had nothing to do(very rare), or rather, we didn't have enough time to ACTUALLY do any serious work. So, Matt and I took Lucy to the creek for the first time. Well, to tell the truth, she actually went once before for about 5 min, but we didn't have the camera, so it doesn't count, right?

We made her go swimming once before in an actual lake. She was not a fan. She's a shepherd/terrier(?) mix so we didn't expect much.

But what dog doesn't like a good creek???

In short, she had a ball. Lucy is going to LOVE living here.






























6 days later, that tree looked like this:






The following Friday, our area got hit with a huge thunderstorm. We got several inches of rain in a matter of hours. Parts of the city flooded and it goes without saying that they are not supposed to flood.

CREEKS, however, are supposed to flood. The run off from the town dumps into a creek, which runs into our creek, which runs into something else. Every time we have a big rain, the terrain of the creek bed changes drastically. The sand bars move, or entirely disappear. Trees that are laying across the creek get swept away. Living trees on the bank fall into the creek creating new blockages. And trash floats down stream, landing on our banks. A little bit erodes each time.

So, right after the storm passed, and Matt got off work, we went to check it out.




The water had already dropped some. As you can see, the water had been out of the banks of the creek.




When we arrived, it was still quite high. We walked around an down past our property line, onto the neighbors side to see where two creeks run into each other. The water was actually moving pretty fast. If Lucy had fallen/jumped in, she would have been gone in a second, down the river(Matt would have jumped in after her). Luckily, she wasn't that interested. Just sniffed it a little before we called her off.




I think she had fun anyway.








We think she might have a low energy problem.

Moving the Kitchen Cabinets

Now that the drywall is done in our house, we had permission to move the kitchen cabinets out of our living room(where they have lived for the past year) and into the new house. Sunday, Matt borrowed a trailer from his parents and Matt and I(yes, just the two of us) loaded the cabinets into the trailer AND carried them upstairs into the new house.










For those of you who would have liked to see me moving these babies up the stairs, sorry, I didn't have any other hands. I'm not that talented. But it was HARD work. The bathroom vanity isn't shown, but it is the largest and heaviest to move.

Also going on: We've had several deliveries.



-On the back wall with the swirly pattern, is the bead board plywood for the deck/porch ceiling.
-On the back left is leftover drywall and a box of window screens.
-The middle is leftover concrete and misc. tools of ours.
-On the floor near my feet is hardiboard siding for the stairwell.
-The long boards near the toolbox are the baseboards(there is actually a whole other stack, not pictured, of window and door trim)

Matt and I worked Saturday on some random stuff like patching the garage bathroom floor around the pipes:



It's not very professional looking, but it will do. It will lighten up once it's completely dried. I'll probably end up painting the floor anyway, so it will blend in.

Then we stayed late to burn stuff. We didn't have enough time to cut up and burn all the trees we needed to. Lucy has done great hanging out loose at the land. She only explores the opened area(has yet to go off into the woods), and comes back to the house regularly. But once it got to be dusk and Matt cranked up the chainsaw and started throwing stuff onto the big fire, we wanted to make sure Lucy didn't run off. We had some rope laying around and some carabiners. I cut it to about 40 ft so she could still walk around and looped it around a tree. She stayed safe and out of the way.

This was once a fire-pit. Now it's a jungle. We haven't had a fire all season and it's totally grown up. In the background the weeds some weeds that are over my head. Not to worry. There is still a ring of rocks around the fire, and the grass was very lush and wet. It really couldn't catch on fire. That would be impressive.

Bulldozer Driving and Rough Mechanical

This is a two part update, so please bear with me. First is the grading work we're doing on the land. Second, is a construction update about the rough mechanical(aka electrical, plumping, HVAC).

Part1:

We've been borrowing our neighbors industrial sized bulldozer. Yeah, some neighbors borrow sugar or maybe a chainsaw. We borrow bulldozers. And he borrows ours. His is 3 times as big as ours and has a scooper bucket on the front to pick up dirt, and also grab things. It's what's necessary for the type of work we've been doing.

Our little bulldozer doesn't have a scooper bucket. It has a scraper blade on the front. It fits in small spaces. It's very useful, but not for what we're doing right now.

Our neighbor has/had a grading company, which is why he has large equipment. We recently found out he is selling it because the economy really hurt his business and I think it is no more. That means our time with it is limited. It being a commercial bulldozer, it's newer and nicer than ours, which means it's easier to drive. Which means...I can drive it. Yes, that's right I DROVE IT! And I was fantastic at it. It's also fully automatic and has pretty simple controls(compared to ours which I will never attempt to drive).






That's me doing work on our loop-around driveway.

Another task Matt wanted to do before losing access to the large bulldozer was to carve out a spot to build a tractor shed at some point in the future. Here's a picture just as we got started on the work. Matt already cleared the trees to the right side.



We're cutting into the bank of this old logging road. It's located just off our driveway, to the right of our house. But set back enough, that it's still kinda hidden. The shed will need to house our little bulldozer, the skid steer, and the little red tractor. No walls, just a roof to protect the equipment.




Here's what it looked like after about 4 hours of work. P.S. I dug out about half of this dirt.





We also made yet another road. This one cuts between the new tractor shed location to the clearing behind our house. The existing road back to the driveway was too sharp of a turn for the tractors, so we made a new one.



Our land kinda has a split personality going on. Half thinks it's in the piedmont, and half thinks it's mountains. The piedmont side is gently sloped and full of pine tree. The mountain side is steep, full of hardwoods, mountain laurel, and large rocks. We were digging into the beginning of the mountain side and dug up many rocks. I have big plans for these, so we are gathering all we can(think rock garden and chimney).




There was a little excitement that afternoon, when we saw a black snake go into our garage and hide under a tarp. It took 30 min of pulling equipment out from under the tarp to finally find the snake and chase it out. He was not happy. I suspect this is the only snake we have(although I don't know how that could be true) because it's the only one we've seen in 4 years.



We saw the same type/breed/species of snake 3 years ago. Might have been the same one. Who knows! We need more. We have lots of rats. I think we scared our owls away by knocking down trees. I hope they come back.


Part 2:

The rough mechanical on our house/apartment is finished. A few loose ends need to be tied up before we have the rough frame inspection. Like the framer has to come back to make repairs to what the subcontractor guys messed up structurally. That's completely standard and unavoidable. For that reason that is why inspectors won't inspect the frame until it's been cut up and repaired.

Here's what it's looking like these days:





The heat pump and air ducts took up more room than we expected. We've pretty much lost our entire attic space.







Washer and dryer hook-ups:



Garage bathroom.
They had to bust up the concrete slab floor and remove some gravel to install the pipes for the toilet.





When the insulation guy came by to make an estimate, he told us it would be wise to seal up all the holes around every pipe running into the living space of the house to save on energy costs. Most were already done by the sub contractors, but there was a huge hole around the tub pipe. We used expanding foam to close it up. I guess we haven't used it enough to know just how much it expands after sitting. We may have gone overkill.


It went from this:



To this: