The last few weeks have just been a flurry of activity on the house. All the walls are up, the roof panels are on, and the interior rough framing will be finished in the next couple days.

Once that’s all done (and inspected) we’re moving on to roofing and siding. We’ve got two different outfits lined up for those and after the work is done, we’ll be completely weather-tight! The can snow, storm and shed water as much as it wants and we can continue to work happily inside.

The inside work will initially consist of electrical, plumbing and planning. Plumbing will be fairly straightforward but we’ll have to figure out a few odd places and how to route pipes so that they’ll have the correct fall with minimal disruption to the structural elements. I’m sure we’ll have to build some soffits to hide things but that’s just part of the project.

Electrical work will be a challenge because we’ve got a lot of exposed ceiling and routing wires will be a challenge. I’ve got a brother who’s a commercial electrician up in Alaska and he’s going to come down and help us out for a week or so this spring. Before he comes though, we need to have everything planned and prepped as much as possible so that he can just work on what he’s good at – running wire and hooking things up correctly. I’m sure that he wouldn’t mind helping out with some construction-esque work to route the wires but there are reasons that he’s a commercial electrician, not a residential electrician.

Once all the walls are up and the space is clean and dry, we can also start planning the kitchen layout, figuring out how our flooring will be arranged and thinking about what sort of railing we’ll using on our numerous edges. The pace of work will slow down considerably but it will be more directly driven and handled just by us – a change we’re definitely looking forward to. It’s been nice (and necessary) to hire some outside help to get us to this point but I’m looking forward to getting back to our original intent of doing it ourselves.

We had our first snowfall that we’ve seen on the property this week! It’s very exciting to be finally living in a place where it snows.

Driving up to the property on Monday morning, it really felt like winter was here as I saw small mounds of snow on the side of the road and the deep green of the evergreens was softened by a little dusting of white.

This shot is from the upstairs master bedroom window looking south.

Progress is being made, although we haven’t had much time in front of the computer in order share what’s happened.  My mother-in-law was kind enough to send me a couple pictures she took yesterday and I thought they were good representations of what we’ve done.

First, here’s our start on the house.  We got delivery on the 7th as planned, and it was challenging getting all the panels up to the house pad and sorted.  They are now all sorted and thanks to some family who were visiting for Thanksgiving, we were able to get a few panels up.  This is the northwest corner of the house.  The panels in the background are the second story panels.  The wood on the very top is not part of the wall, it is there to protect the panels from moisture.

And our other big project has been working with PG&E to get our power going.  They pulled power up the hill and down to our subpanel last week, and yesterday someone came by and installed our meter.  Check it out – you don’t often get to see a meter that reads this!

And yes, we have power!  Matt is doing electrical work today so that we can plug the trailer in and have some outlets down near the house pad.  I think the well is already set to go, but I’m not sure.   It will be nice not to have to run the generator all the time!

Well, finally, things are starting to happen! We got a septic permit this week, and we started working on that system. Our building permit should be coming any day now, and in anticipation we’ve started chalking the outline of the house and getting ready to do some foundation work.

Here’s Emma, helping with the chalk outline. The chalk comes in a big bag and you scoop it out with a cup then carefully pour it out to follow your line.

Here’s the finished outline

Here’s our septic tank being delivered

And here’s Al moving the largest of the stumps. We had him move all the stumps that were too big for us to tackle and now we have lots of lovely clear space!

And look, no stumps! Yes, I know, it is still a mess, but at least it is a mess we can deal with without large equipment.

And we also got gravel spread on our driveway and parking pad, so that when it rains we hopefully won’t disappear into the mud and muck.

Here’s some pictures of our camp, now that we’re nicely settled.  Looking at these pictures makes me think of a squatter’s camp (as my brother said) but in person I think it is a bit more attractive.

Here’s the kitchen:

Here’s the “living room”:

Here’s a shot of the garden and the camp beyond:

And here’s Matt and his grandfather putting a roof on the workshed.

And in other news we’ve submitted our corrections and we should (fingers crossed!) have our permit next week.  Yippee!   We also bought a used trailer which needs a little work (mainly in the bathroom, as far as we know right now) but the price was right and it is in good shape otherwise.  It is a 1988 23′ 5th wheel, and it will become home in another month or so.   It may sound small, but the amenities are certainly a lot better than a tent!