Finally, the mast image does actually represent our house! That’s my dad and me working on the form boards and my maternal grandmother sitting in the chair watching.

* Once we pay our fire, school and remaining county fees…

Update: All moneys have been paid and we now have a building permit for real!

We’ve moved most of our stuff to storage, I’m working on getting my office setup and we’ve got a basic camp setup on the property. We’ll be improving it as we go and pictures will likely follow next week but I just wanted to let everyone know that we’re here and it’s going well.

Wait, that sounds odd.

We have submitted our plans to the county building department and we have our permit number. Thanks the wonders of the modern world, we can now plug our number into a website and watch our plans go through the various steps required for getting our plans approved. Now we just wait and hope that everything goes smoothly!

Matt did find one potential snag though – our official plans have us using a perimeter foundation rather than a cement slab. Apparently the engineering folks did that part wrong. Matt has talked to our project manager and she’s going to figure out how to fix it. Matt doesn’t think it will be too big of a problem, and I hope he’s right.

In regards to that whole laundry list of things Matt needed to do yesterday, he managed to get it all done. He even squeezed in a couple additional stops for lunch, groceries and a couple other things. The ReStore didn’t have any windows or doors that would work for us, but they did have a lot of other neat stuff. Matt picked up a mailbox for us for $5 and said that it is definitely a place I need to check out.

Today Matt is going to start on his workshed. He still needs to finish leveling the site and he needs to move the lumber around, so he said he’ll be happy if he can at least get the floor in place. He does have the camera, so he should have some pictures when he gets back.

Matt got a call this afternoon from our project manager at SHS and our plans are done in engineering. We are ready to submit! Matt was already going to go up this weekend to work on his workshed, and now he’s going to meet with with SHS, pick up the plans, and submit everything to the county on Friday afternoon.

Yippee, things are moving!

So you know how our plans were supposed be done in engineering by the end of May?  Well, Matt got an email yesterday saying that the engineers were going to work on them this week.  Um, gee, thanks?

We are going up to frolic, err, work on the property this weekend though. We’re all looking forward to being up there again.  The plan as it stands right now is to rent a chipper on Saturday and attempt to chip as much of the slash pile as possible.  I’m not sure what else we’ll be doing while we’re up there, but I’m sure it will involve a chainsaw.  There should be new pictures up early next week.

Matt just got an email this morning from the company who is drawing up our plans and doing the engineering work and unfortunately things are going to be further delayed. They’ve lost one of their engineers and all the work is getting stuck in the engineering bottleneck. They’re now hoping to have engineering done by the end of the month.

As Matt said, “Oh well, what can you do?” At least we’re in the pipeline and it will get done. As someone at the park playday said yesterday, these delays seem like a long time now but once we’ve been in house for awhile they won’t seem like much at all.

There isn’t really anything new to report, but I thought I would do a status update anyways. Our plans are still undergoing engineering review and should be done “soon”. Once they are done there, then they will be off for shop panel drawings. After that we should be getting our bundle of plans and such to submit to the county. Once it is in county review, it will take at least four to five weeks before we have our building permit.

Not much is happening on the property either. We need to get permits in order to do more work, (septic system and trenching for power, specifically) and in order to do that we need a final site plan. That’s supposed to be close to being done, but we’ve been hearing that for awhile now. (months, in fact)

We’re going up this weekend to move some things up into storage with a rental truck. I don’t anticipate getting much done on the property, but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get a better feel for where the garden should go. I think Matt is going to start doing some site prep for the work shed and he’ll probably continue to cut up trees, since there is always more of that to do!

At least things are moving along, albeit slowly. I suppose I should get used to it now because I’m sure this will just be the way it is for a good long while!

I entered many of the books that I’ve either referred to during design or plan to use during construction into LibraryThing and added a randomized sampling to the sidebar.