This is the site we chose for our new house.
Since this blog serves in part as a timeline, I’m using this first post to play catch-up (catsup?). In general, we’ll try to post once or twice a month or so, although during the winter we probably won’t post much at all.
We bought our land here in the U.P. at the end of July, 2005. One of the first things we wanted to do was build a cordwood shed, both to house our tools while we work on the house, and to see if we could even build anything, neither of us having ever built a structure of any kind before. We surveyed the house site, had electrical service installed and were able to get the shed completed to the point where it had a roof (covered in tarps) before the snow came in December.
We spent the next 6 months designing the house, with much help from energy-efficient-house-builder Dave Bach, who we’ve designated Official Guru for this project. June of 2006 saw two milestones – our house plans were approved by the building department, and we received 27 full cords of cedar logs which had been cut in 2003 and were destined for the pulp mill. We also spent the first half of the summer finishing the shed (except for the cordwood walls), gathering foundation materials and having a water well drilled.
The real business of building the house began in August 2006, when Frank Beauchamp, our foundation contractor, broke ground. But that’s a tale for another post…