Author: Melissa Gullickson

Yesterday and today there hasn’t been much activity. We are waiting on an inspection next Thursday, so thinks won’t pick up again for a few days. We will have some more fill brought in for the back of the house on Monday.

With a bit of down time we have been spending more time over at our other property, tending to our garden, fruit trees and other plants.  We are just amazed at our garden. We thought planting it was almost a waste of time as we would be gone for a month, back for a few days and then gone again for two weeks. We figured it would be taken over by weeds and without TLC, lost of the plants might not do well.  All I can say is, the garden is doing fantastic! Love to think we have some kind of miraculous green thumb, but I’m sure it more likely just good luck on our part.  I’m going to share some photos so you can see for yourself.

Look at the height of the potato plants, neither of us has seen them grow so tall before. Hope they actually produce potatoes under all that foilage.

The corn has also grown so big and so quickly. I think we might get more than we can eat!

We planted a bunch of strawberry plants (we’ll miss our ones from Alberta, they produced lots of delicious berries each year).  At the other end of the bed I’m going to try and find some dwarf blueberry plants for next year.

The monster plant at the back is an indigo cherry tomato plant, it is huge! The tomatoes are dark purple and start to turn red when they are ripe. In front is a nice Roma tomato plant. Beside that is our green pepper, green onions and a yellow zuchinni. The only thing that didn’t do well was the garlic we planted. Next year we will do better with that.

Here are the peas, 3 kinds, and two kinds of beets. The carrots are just starting to come up.

Here is the green beans, I’ve just planted another row and will plant more in a couple weeks. In front is spinach and three types of lettuce.

I also planted some flowers, gladiolus, cana lily and dinnerplate dahlias.

I took a real chance and planted some pumpkin (not for carving but for making pies), watermelon and cantelope. Normally these should all be started inside early and then transplated, but I planted them from seed and am experimenting to see if we can actually get anything before the end of the season. They are pretty small still, but we have some hot weather coming up and I think they might like that.

Also, we have more grapes this year on our grape plants than last, so we are excited about that.

And although we didn’t grow these, we sure love to pick them and eat them. We picked 3/4 of a gallon of saskatoon berries the other night and have been enjoying them on icecream, in pancakes and in a pie shortly. Yum!!! we plan to pick more to while we can.

Last but not least, Aron thought I should mention that we had our first big delivery of building materials the other day. They are sitting all tarped up right now, waiting for next week.

Aron also wanted me to mention a couple of incidents that happened last week and he says we should ‘keep it real’ on the blog and not make it look like everything is going perfect all the time. Our property is located adjacent to a former rail line, now called Rails to Trails, owned by the gov’t and used for hiking, biking, etc. Our road has to cross the Rails to Trails and so with all the activity last week, one lady came down to yell about it, especially as one worker had parked their vehicle off to the side and she was having none of it. She said she would report us. Then a day or two later a guy came down our road yelling something and taking photos of the construction. There was yelling back and forth between him and the workers ( not sure what was all said), but he claimed we didn’t have a permit to do this and he was off to report us. The end result of all this was that it did upset me and Aron a bit, not knowing if anything would result. Our contractor wasn’t really worried, but we are the newbies here and always waiting for something to ‘go wrong’. We did end up with two site visits, on regarding worker safety and the other regarding the safety of the Rails to Trails. In the end, the visit were quick and nothing really came out of them except we had to post caution signs on the trail during our construction, which we have done. Whew!

 

So the forms are all removed from the foundation pours. Here is a picture of the house as it looks without the forms.  We were really surprised that they take the forms off so quickly, basically the next day. Everything looks good!

Now that the forms are off, we are ready to bring in fill. Over the last two days they have probably brought in over 150 dump truck loads of fill. Luckily for us a neighbor right across the road is selling us fill for a really fantastic price so the dump trucks can go and fill up and be back in under 10 minutes. This was a big cost savings for us and he charged us a nominal amount for the fill the the trucks could do over 80 trips the first day.

Day one the fill was mostly used to fill in the foundation of the garage. The fill had to be packed, layer by layer, to make a firm foundation for the garage floor to be poured on. Aron even got to run the compactor and help out. (That’s him in the orange)

 

Today they are just stock piling the fill for a short while. They have to do the waterproofing on the house foundation and put in the weeping tile and drainage fill. Once that is complete the piles of fill will be contoured to make a smooth transition from the house foundation to the ground.

So at the end of today, the garage foundation was all filled in and packed. Next steps will be the actually building being constructed and then pouring the concrete floor. Very exciting!!!

Things are moving fast, there will be more updates soon!!

This past weekend we finally officially moved to our BC property to live out of our travel trailer while the house and garage are built. It is still quite surreal and just feels like we are on a vacation right now, not sure how long before it will sink in that we are here to stay this time.

Today is an exciting day, as they are pouring our foundations. It will take about 5 cement trucks to deliver all the concrete for the house, garage and pump house. It is a bit more work than usual as the cement trucks are too heavy to drive down our steep driveway safely, so they have to run long hoses down to the house and garage to fill the forms. Every once and awhile the hose will ‘clog’ up and they have to use hammers to break the clog up and move it down the hose. I’m sure they will be glad when this day is over.

Here are shots of them pouring for the garage

and the house

If you look hard you can see the cement truck up at the top of the picture through the trees and the hose is run down the hill to the building site.

Tomorrow they will be bringing in about 100 loads of fill. Should be a busy day and there should be some good images to share. Stay tuned!

 

I wish I could say that I had actually felt the earth moving as the excavation began on our property, but unfortunately, fate didn’t allow for that to happen. We headed out to our property to be on site for the start of our build, with excavation being the first step. Unfortunately there was a mechanical problem with the excavator which caused a delay and they weren’t able to begin until the day we left, so we missed all the fun.

Our builder did send us a quick photo to show us they were getting some work done.  They should have the excavation completed by tomorrow and then begin prepping for the footings and foundation.

We are just tying up all the loose ends to get our Airdrie house on the market and then on June 30th we will head back to BC to start living on site. I’m expecting I’ll have some exciting progress to report on my next update.

Stay tuned, exciting times!!!!!

UPDATE: Few more picture to share, the excavation on the house and garage are completed.

Prep for footings is complete!

A late update on our May 18 through the 23rd visit to the property.

The drive out was a very long day. It normally takes us about 7 hours  but this time, because of a mudslide on Highway 3, took us over 12 hours.  Sigh…

The snowpack this year is 120% of normal and with the recent hot tempatures plus some severe thunderstorms, our river was at a very high level. It wasn’t quite as high as last year, but it was high and muddy.  It started to drop after we arrived and has continued to drop since we left.

We met with our builder this trip and finalized the last piece of information needed to get our building permit approved. Now there is nothing standing in our way of getting started, except our builders schedule. We are planning to head back to our property on June 8th with the hope of getting the house and garage staked out and begin excavation for the footings. Hopefully no more delays!!!!

Sorry for the delay in posting again. I have to say that the summer and fall was fairly stressful for us. The problems we ran into with the water during the excavation continued to plague us. The neighbors ended up filing a complaint because the water we re-directed from the excavation site ended up on their property and was flooding their garden. The regional district said we would need to get a water management plan in place to deal with the water.  Since we were making no progress on the excavation, we called in the engineers to draw up a plan to stabilize the building site and water issues as well as draw up a water management plan. It took them until the end of August to provide us the plans and once we got a quote on implementing the plans we were looking at a huge amount of money (20 times more than we had budgeted for the excavation originally).

At this point we stopped and evaluated the whole project. If we proceeded with the build we were going to be extremely over budget right from the start of the project and then we knew we could run into a similar situation when we started to build the house.  When we calculated the total amount we could end up spending, building both the house and garage/loft house, it just didn’t make sense any more. This was a pretty difficult and emotional decision, since we have been working and planning for this for many years.  So what do we do now?

Well we decided to have our realtor show us some properties in the area that have existing houses. We thought that we might find an amazing property where we could just renovate the house instead of building from scratch. We viewed around a dozen properties and none of them really fit the bill for us. At that point our realtor mentioned he had been saving something amazing to show us if we were open to looking at a piece of raw land. I was very hesitant after our recent heart break, I just didn’t think I could start again from scratch on another place. But we decided to at least have a look.  The property is about 3 acres on the Slocan River. We spend a few hours on the property getting a feel for the place and exploring.

Here are a few photos of the property:

 

Since the property is long and narrow, there is about 1500 feet of river frontage. Here are the pros and cons we had to consider:

Pros

• Amazing river frontage
• Private sandy beach
• Private, no visible neighbors
• Walking distance to nearest community
• Easy access to Rails and Trails for hiking, biking and cross country skiing

Cons

• Raw land, no electricity, road, sewer, well
• Gov’t approval required to get roads and electric in place, may take signigifcant time and money to acquire
• Road noise can be heard
• Small area avaiable to build, will have to get new house plan (smaller in size)

After much consideration, we decided to put an offer on the land. After some negotation on the price, our offer was accepted. As of Nov 28th, 2014 we became the official owners.

You are probably wondering what we plan to do with our original property. Well we still love it and have decided to hang on to it. We will fill in the excavation that was done last summer and deal with the water issues.  Our future plans are to build a small 2 bedroom cabin that will be a vacation rental.

For our new property, we have to work a bit longer to pay for it before we can start to build a home on the property. Our timeline is to start building a home in 2017. In the meantime, we purchased a used 28′ travel trailer, which we will park on the property so we can stay in it when we are out there. Over the next couple of years we will work on getting the intrastructure in place (well, electricity and a road). I will post here periodically as we visit the property and start making some progress.

 

Well… I thought I’d be able to share some good news about our build by now. Unfortunately things have not been going as planned. We headed out to our property at the end of June planning to stay for 2 weeks.  Sam, our excavator, was on site within a day or so and started the excavation. He initially expected to take about 1 day to excavate before our contractor (Kim), could come and start working on the footings and start cribbing. It became apparent very quickly that the water we expected to encounter was more of an issue than anyone anticipated. The water came out just above ground level and since it was clay at that level, the banks kept sloughing causing everything above to collapse down. We were hoping that with the extrememly hot weather, the water might dry up, but this didn’t happen.  Just before we left, Kim came out and they dug back enough to accomodate the garage, including the engineered wall and footings. Then Sam dug a large trench at the back to hopefully direct water away. We expected some sloughing, but hoped after some sloughing the bankd would stablize, allowing the main area to dry out and work to begin. At this point we were packing up to head home, so we were well behind where we hoped we’d be by now.  Here is some photos of the build area throughout our stay.

 

The weather was very hot while we were out there, in fact here is is the forecast of the weather for the week after we left.

Since we have left things have continued to be problematic with the water and sloughing. Sam and Kim have decided to put in a large cement block retaining wall to see if they can control the sloughing and put in a geotech fabric with drainage rock to direct the water away from the building site. I hope that we can get this going soon!

Here are a few pictures to show how much soil was piled up from the excavation. This is only part of it, the rest was used to created an extended parking area up top or hauled down to the bottom of our property.

 

We are thinking we will be heading out for a quick trip around the middle of August to deliver the windows and doors and check on how things are going. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

 

Well we just got back from our trip to our BC property for the May long weekend.  Amazing, everything out there was so green and lush, it was hard to believe that back home the leaves aren’t even all out yet. Saw beautiful flowering fruit trees and the grass was over a foot tall.

Met with out builder and the start date for the build is now the end of June. This is a bit later than we initially thought, but I think it will work well for us. Looking forward to getting things started.

During our visit we planted some new trees, trimmed some grass, killed a bunch of thistles (hopefully), moved some of the trees that were felled last fall and just enjoyed nature. We had at least 3 different hummingbirds visit our feeder. They were back often and didn’t seemed too concerned when we were standing near the feeder.

 

One of frequent visitors

One of our apple trees in bloom, beautiful!

Come back and catch up in July, as we’ll be heading back out to see the start of the build begin.  Counting down the days 🙂

 

 

We just got home from a quick trip to our property. Although we were only there a couple days we got a few things done. First Aron installed an electric outlet in our little cabin. Yahoo!!! I never thought we’d actually have electricity until we moved into the garage apartment, so this is awesome.  Now we can have a fridge and microwave.

We also pruned all our fruit trees and tried to make a start at getting all the trees we had felled last fall, cut up and moved out of the building site. We got some done, but have a lot more work to do next trip.

And we were able to pick up our building permit. It’s official,

 

Next trip planned for May long weeked. More updates to come!!!