So, out on our land things continue… not exactly apace, but there’s definite progress. Kathryn’s been working with various people – a wetland biologist, builders, etc, to try and move our project forward.
This involves the fun things like getting quotes for groundworks, which after the astonishing amount of water that fell from the sky, first in snow form then in rain form, have taken on a new level of complexity. Our first plan didn’t really include a lot of drainage around the house site, this updated one does – at painfully increased expense. We’ve also moved the house site forward, it’s now closer to the road. Practically, this should save us a little on the cost of the road, but also it’s slightly higher ground that’s not being assaulted by the flow of water from the county culvert.
As part of that, one of the groundworks folks went out to flag the land, but there seems to have been some miscommunication, in so far as the building he flagged was about twice the size of the one we’re intending to build. So we went out yesterday and looked at the land, and tromped around in the rain, and ended up deciding on a slight shift in position of the house. That meant that we also needed to tweak the position of the driveway…
…and we also pondered that, for the sake of costs, we should perhaps move the well closer to the garage…
We’ve also had fun debating where we’re going to put the biogas digester – although given the cost of various other things, I’m tempted to go for the kit rather than the drop-in-thingie. I’d wanted to go with the drop-in-plastic thingie, because time-wise it’d work better, and frankly because we’ve enough to do, but as other costs increase something has to give elsewhere. Although this looks like a cheaper, less longlasting, but perhaps good-enough-for-now option…
We’ve trimmed our building down too – since our current design (and frankly, the situation) calls for us to have a garage straight away (because that’s where we’re putting ‘the machine room’ (laundry, geothermal, hot-water heater) lives). It’s faintly amusing that the garage is almost as large as the house, although anyone who’s known me for any length of time probably won’t be hugely surprised by that.
We finally seem to have come up with something that we’re a bit happier with. There’s this really awkward wall that is required for structural purposes – which we’ve had real trouble with working around. Finally, a momentary flash of cunning meant that we’ve created a sort of den in a space that was otherwise a complete pain in the arse. We’d tried really open-plan, and really not open plan. And this seems to be a moderate compromise which also makes the room more interesting shapes (because square rooms are not really very interesting).
Anyhow, we’ll see how achievable/affordable it works out…
At least I’m feeling a bit excited about it again. While we were out on the land I was reminded just why we like it so much*.
* No matter if our groundworks person says “uh, I wouldn’t have bought this…”