Posted on by Emily

DAY 133

Well, a lot has happened in the last 3 weeks:

  1. We got our building permit! After the “plan review fee”, the “privilege tax”, the “educational impact fee”, and a handful of other absurd fees, I’m pretty sure we’ve paid for a county employee’s annual salary in order to obtain our permit.
  2. It has rained approximately 67″  this February, which has put everyone in construction behind and has delayed us breaking ground until the earthwork guys catch up.  Patiently waiting…..
  3. I had surgery and Josh has been buried in his Finance class so we hadn’t been able to go for a site visit until yesterday.
  4. Our neighbor’s barn is nearly finished.  Our construction envy is growing by the minute.
  5. The critters have come out in full force! We had a record 60 videos on the trail camera this time, which is about 5X as many as we’ve had before.

 

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Neighbor’s barn.  Maybe one day there will be a structure on our property, too.  Not jealous or anything.

Focusing on our wildlife for now.

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I think this is an owl on the ground to the right of the trees.  Josh agreed with my assessment for once.

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Up close and personal with Bambi.

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Practicing for her real ID picture.

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Turkey invasion!

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House cat makes an appearance.

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Turkeys are back for the first recorded snow since we’ve had the camera!

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Our resident black squirrel with white-tipped tail dashing by on a sunny day.  I can’t wait for Bu (our indoor house cat) to lay his eyes on this guy.  He’s going to lose his mind.

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Evidently our neighbors believe in free-range horses.  Exhibit A.

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Exhibit B.

Remind me to look into a property fence…

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Pretty blue bird on the ground below the trees.  Looked very busy.

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Cute little bunny! Another creature for Bu to go nuts over from his indoor perch.

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And finally, more snow! It didn’t snow at all at our current house on the other side of town.  I can’t wait to be in the new house and watch it snow this time next year.

Patiently waiting…..

Posted on by Emily

Day 106

Let’s start with some excellent news: Punxsutawney Phil did NOT see his shadow!

This is a big deal when you’re hoping to break ground in the next few weeks.

Speaking of that, I got really excited earlier this week when I received an email that said “construction permit approved”.  I forwarded it to Joshua with roughly 1,000 exclamation points.  He texted me to gently inform me that that approval was not what I thought it was.  Had I taken the time to read the next two words in the email subject line, I would have seen the words “conventional system”, which refers to the type of septic system we will have.  This was an email confirming our septic permit approval, which we knew had been approved several weeks back.

Oh well.

Another email came through this week that said “Permit decline reasons”.  As excited as I was about the previous email, I was equally deflated upon receiving this one.  It turns out the “decline reasons” weren’t really for anything we could have anticipated.  We had carefully reviewed all checklists and submittal requirements before we sent in our plans, but the county likes to come up with additional items because they can.  We ran into this earlier in the process with our plat so weren’t entirely surprised.

Thankfully, we should be able to satisfy these additional requirements, and hopefully get our building permit any day now.

Patiently waiting….

In the meantime, we drove out to the property Friday evening to review where the house had been staked by the surveyor as we had indicated it on our site plan.  We are really trying to save the tree that is in front of the house.  The driveway will run between the tree and the front porch so we wanted to make sure there will be enough clearance.  We decided that we’ll need to limb up the tree a bit but that we should be able to keep it.  Whew!

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These flags do not photograph well and it’s hard to tell much about the shape of the house, but we verified that edges and corners were in a good spot.  You can see the tips of the tree branches we were discussing on the left.

You can also see Josh photobombing my lovely shot as he was carrying my chair so I could practice sitting on the front porch.

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photo credit: Joshua, from the living room

There’s the tree again, this time on the right side.  We confirmed that the west-facing front porch is in a great spot.  This was an overcast evening, but I can’t wait for many spectacular evenings on the front porch, watching the sunset.   I think our realtor thought I was a little nuts, but when we were searching for a piece of land, one of my requirements was that the front of the property had to face west so we could have this setup.

I cannot wait to be sitting on the actual front porch!

On our drive into the property, we spotted a new structure underway at one of the neighboring properties:

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I have construction progress envy…