Everyone needs a mailbox. Especially when you live about 13 miles from the nearest post office. So, we asked a dear friend of ours to use some of her artistic talent to paint a little scene on our mailbox. Recently she finished it and this weekend I made a trip to Lowes to pick up some supplies including a cedar mailbox post. A little more expensive than I wanted, but it will last practically forever and we intend on keeping this mailbox until it rusts into a pile of dust.
Saturday afternoon Rachel and I carefully checked the county regulations on mailboxes and dug the hole and dropped the post in place. We attached a small piece of wood to the “arm” of the post and then nailed the mailbox onto the anchor wood. So here is the mailbox. Later we are going to hang a piece of wood below the mailbox with stenciled or woodburned numbers on both sides. That way, down the road, when we move we can take the mailbox and change the numbers easily. Check out the donkey in the back – it is our neighbor’s donkey who brays every morning, afternoon and evening. I believe it’s his or her feeding time. He (or she) also brays whenever I manage to make to make enough noise to disturb him. Which happens frequently. What can I say – I’m a noisy cuss.
The other night I was working late shoveling dirt. Seems to be an occupation of mine lately. Just after the sun set I slightly startled to hear a limb from a pine tree come crashing down. I looked up to see what I initially thought was large hawk taking off from the top of the pine tree to wing it over to another tree that was about 100 feet away. He (or she) landed in that tree. It was then that I was able to see it clearly enough to realize that it was what appeared to be a great horned owl. At about 18 – 24 inches in height he was probably full grown or close to it. He sat on the new tree for about five minutes even after I continue to shovel dirt. Apparently I was not worthy of his interest. After a short rest, he flew off in search of prey.
So far we have seen rabbits, squirrel, hawk and one deer (and numerous tracks). I suspect that as we begin living on the property we will see even more wildlife. After we scraped the house site there have been deer tracks all over the dirt. I have seen one set of tracks that were probably the biggest deer tracks I have ever seen in Florida.
This is one of the reasons we moved out to the forest. Being near a creek and across the street from a wildlife management area attracts the wildlife. Now if we can just keep Duke from running them all off. . .
Let me tell you about my better half. She is the reason why I am building this house. She was the one who came across the Log Home Builders Association site. She is doing at least half the work. Probably more.
We had been wanting to build a kit log home for some time — I recently came across a copy of Log Home Living magazine that we had bought in 1998. It was fortunate that, at the time, we didn’t have the money to buy a kit home.
Now that we have the resources, we have the right information that we learned from the guys at LHBA. No kit homes for us!! It’s more fun, cheaper and you end up with a better product doing it yourself.
But, I digress. She is simply amazing. Right now she is stuck on the property with (rain) water all over the place, no septic hookup, no Internet and no tap water because of a problem with the electrical hookup. In addition, there is no satellite TV to entertain the munchkins while they are cooped up. All in less than 300 sq feet of living space with four children. She could go somewhere else and be comfortable . . but that is not her way. She will be there tomorrow morning when the people show up to fix the electricity, install the Internet and the satellite TV. She will probably finish the hookup of the septic tank to the trailer as well. Something that I am apparently not capable of doing. (Talked to Rachel tonight – she fixed the septic earlier today)
And knowing her, she will start numbering our logs and measuring the diameters of the ends as well so we can figure out how we need to stack them.
So, we press on. I think we already have enough patience and perseverance. That isn’t what the problems are about. I suspect it is just because good things don’t come easily. And since we have never done this before we have to learn as we go along.
They say some people “marry up”. Well, I was the frog and I married the princess. Fortunately she has pulled me ahead more than I have pulled her back. And my princess can both wear pink and swing a hammer.
With all due respect to Ren and Stimpy and 2-cents..that about sums it up. As of Sunday afternoon around 12:30 pm we had 112 pine logs on our property ready to go. As Paul Harvey would say, now for the rest of the story . . .
So far, this has been the most frustrating part of the job. And I expect it will remain that way. Ironically I had “free” logs on property about 60 miles from our property. The logs belonged to my dad and uncle and really aren’t free — we have to pay pulp-wood price for them. Even so, for 12 – 17 inch butt diameter logs that’s not bad. And we knew right were they were..heck I help plant them 25 years ago. Well, I started calling around, craigslist etc. After a long frustrating search I had about four or five guys actually respond. We are talking about 112 marked trees in a well maintained timber lot with wide “aisles” and already been thinned. I had quotes from between $8,000 and $12,000. Hmm…that seems a LITTLE high. Remember, they are just cutting and delivering the logs .. not supplying them. At this point I must admit I kind of panicked. I didn’t know what to do. So, with my dear wife’s encouragement I kept calling. I finally found a good old boy name Bill who lived just a couple of miles from our property who really isn’t a logger anymore but who had buddies in the business. After several weeks we managed to get up to property and every one took a look. After another week I finally got a quote — $4,000 with me supplying the unloader.
Well, that seemed much better than the previous quotes and I agreed. After two more weeks it turns out the buddies decided not to do the work. I started looking again, predictably even more frustrated. I began looking at buying logs from somewhere else figuring at a minium of 8k for cut and deliver and another 3k or so for the logs themselves it would probably be cheaper.Well, to make an already long story a bit shorter, another friend of Bill called. We talked over the phone (he had already talked to Bill about the timber) and he told me he would cut and deliver and unload them for 4k. The unloading part probably saved me at least 500 – 1000 dollars. Sounded good to me!
This conversation happened a week ago last Sunday while I was driving up to Atlanta. He and his crew met me at the property at 8:30 AM the next Saturday and had the trees cut and loaded by 2:30 pm. Not only that, they did an excellent job and didn’t do any significant damage to the lot while doing the thinning.While it took a bit of shuffling with the trucks due to the need to get the loader/unloader to the property, we had the logs on the ground at our property by 12:30 pm Sunday. All in all, it turned out to be a good experience and I will be using this logger in the future. He logs all around the area and can get me whatever I need given a reasonable amount of time.
The equipment used was pretty cool. The loader/unloader was incredible – about 60 ft long on the back of a flatbed truck and able to pick up several logs at a time. The cutter would grab a tree, cut through it and then use the “hands” to control the direction of the tree’s descent. At one point I saw the cutter chop through what was probably close to a 60 foot tree and after the tree started to fall he stopped it about after it was at about a 30 degree angle from vertical and then drop it the opposite direction. This was done to keep the tree from crushing other trees on the way down. Very impressive and not something I can do with a chainsaw
Here is a picture of the crane used to load and unload the trees:
The skidder was used to drag the trees to the staging area where they were loaded into the log trucks:
And this is log cutter working on the last tree. The saw blade is down near the bottom of the clamps used to grab the tree.
Log Cutter
So what did I learn? I should have started seriously looking for a good logger before we began anything else. And secondly, loggers can put a truck in places that are simply unbelievable. So don’t give up. Follow every lead. You will find them. If you want to save money it will take longer than you think. Sure, more money can buy you logs sooner. Even so, I want to keep my money to buy my truck.
And next time I go looking for property I will look long and hard to find a place that has the right timber on the property. Even if I don’t want to cut the trees down it will cost me pretty much nothing to have someone come in and just cut the trees down. Then I can de-limb them and a simple chaining to the tractor and pulling them to the house sight.
The trees are Southern Yellow Pine – primarily loblolly with a a few slash pines. Some quick measuring shows they are between 12 and 17 inches at the base and 9 – 14 inches at the top (35 feet for most of them – 45 feet for a half-dozen). Now it’s time to debark them. . . .
I am many posts behind. We have had much activity. But I have been wanting to write this particular one for a while.
It continually amazes me when dealing with small businesses how unprofessional they can be. I have been in touch with many of them over the last two months. Often they don’t answer the phone, don’t return phone calls, say they are going to bid on something and then don’t or tell me something will be done by a certain time and then don’t get it finished.
On the other hand, I have had some great experiences. I needed an interior blueprint done and called a local architect about 7:00 pm on a Friday night. He called back at 8:30 pm and talked about it. The next day we met and went over what we needed and he had the plans drafted by Tuesday. Was it necessary? No, I didn’t expect to meet with him before Monday. It was reasonable to have a few days .. maybe Thursday or Friday before it was done. Was it a great experience? Absolutely. Will I go back to him again? Yes.
As an example of a bad experience, last week I was securing bids on electrical work. We need temporary power and will need the house roughed in when the roof and interior framing is up. Well, I called or emailed six places. I received replies from three. One returned a bid in three days that was crazy high. One (the winner) returned a reasonable bid in two days. Another promised a bid on Friday of last week when I called on Thursday morning. On Monday afternoon I called again. Oh, we will have that to you by the end of the day. On Tuesday at 10:00 am I called and left a message on the voice mail saying if I didn’t have a quote by 1:00 pm to not call. Well, at least they listened that time and didn’t bother calling.
If you are building and find a good business to do your concrete, well, electrical, plumbing or whatever hang on to them. They are worth gold.
Ask around. Friends, neighbors whoever. What has been their experience? You shouldn’t just blindly trust what they think, but it makes a good reference for your search.
Today we were notified by the county that our permit was ready. Yeah!! It took a lot of work, and multiple trips to the office but it is now in our hands.
Now we can get temporary electricity on the property so we can stop using the clunky generator. Amazing how we take electricity for granite.
Coming up this weekend is the hopeful completion of the burning of the rest of the refuse left from clearing (a pile 10 feet high and 15 feet across) and the installation of the 16 foot power pole for the temporary power.
Quite frequently when you are a building a log home it is far enough from a city or town that you have no option for hooking up to municipal sewage. We had that “problem” and so it was necessary* to use a septic.
Since we are going to be living on the property in a travel trailer it also had to that it be one of the first parts of the puzzle put in place. Ideally it would have waited until the walls and roof where put up so that we could move freely around the house with the forklift for the logs. Even so, we have managed to place it so that it should not be too difficult.
I found after the fact that we could have put in the septic tank ourself. You can buy a tank and then just follow the regulations of your jurisdiction. For example, the septic tank must be a certain distance from the well (75′ in our case). That kind of thing. As long as you have a clear understanding of what is going on the installation itself is not super difficult with a backhoe. Next time I suspect I will do it myself.
On the appointed day my dear wife and father met the septic tank people at the property. To begin a hole has to be dug. A backhoe makes short work of this. Once this is done the tank(s) are lowered into the ground. In some jurisdictions there is a requirement for a tank for the laundry water as well as the main sewage tank. Below you see the laundry tank being lowered in beside the main tank:
Rachel got a chance to drive the backhoe. I’m jealous…
The essential idea of a septic tank is to hold solid wastes and allow the liquid waste to dissipate through what are called “leech lines”. Here are ours before being covered up:
Of course you have to have piping coming from the house to the tanks. That essentially is it. A pretty straightforward process. One which the “do it yourselfer” can handle and save some money (and get to run a backhoe which is always fun!).
* OK..maybe not stricly necessary. But for purposes of this discussion it is necessary.
We did some “hands-on” clearing of the land . . . enough to get back to the home site. Because of time constraints we choose to use a bulldozer to clear the home site itself. As with all of this, we could have done it by hand.
The grading happened on Tuesday, August the 25th. The previous Saturday, while we were working with the well digger, Jason and his brother came out to the land to take a look at things. Turns out his bulldozer had a 10 foot blade. Wow! Nothing wimpy about this monster. I think we wasted some serious time cutting the road in..he could have done it in five minutes on his way into the house site. C’est la vie I suppose.
In the space of a couple of hours he knocked over a dozen or so trees..a couple of which are pretty big . . and leveled out the building sight. Although I never took a picture of it, the largest and most annoying was an old oak tree that was probably at least two feet in diameter. My father-in-law and I cut on it one Saturday for quite some time and managed to make a notch in it before the chainsaw stopped. Jason ended up having to dig a pretty big hole to get it down, but it was still significantly faster than our efforts. Best money I have spent in a while!
If you remember from my previous post, this was the area before work began…
The ‘dozer brand matches my work boots (Cat). Must be why it works so well:
One side of the cleared area . . .
There are times when you can use your money wisely to speed this process along immensely. This would be one of those times!!
Well, not really. But in our case we are going to live on the property in a travel trailer while we build so we need water, power and a septic tank to be able to stay there. So we began with water. Since there is no city water in our neck of the woods it was mandatory that we have a well. While it requires more expense up front it does mean I can irrigate the garden without an worries about expensive water bills.
Russell Well and Pump Service did a great job putting in our new well. At 120′ we hit about 30 gallons a minute of water which is more than sufficient for our needs. My understanding is that if you get at least 10 gallons a minute it would be sufficient for a single family home so we are well over that.
This is the first time I have seen a well being dug. Russell brought two trucks out to the property. One truck carried a large water tank and the second truck that had a boom attached to it. When this boom was raised a metal pipe with a drill inside it was attached. The drill bit is used to dig into the soil and stone and water is injected into the hole at the same time to simultaneously bring up the loose material and keep the equipment cool. When this water comes out of the ground it is run into a a large pan that is used to allow the mud and sediment to separate out from the water and then recirculate the water back into the the hole.
At the same time the hole is being drilled a fairly large diameter piece of PVC piping is being put in to keep the walls from collapsing. Once a satisfactory volume of water is reached the drill is removed and a smaller PVC pipe is put in along with the well pump and an electrical cable to supply power for the pump. Once this cable is hooked up to power you can turn on the pump and watch the water come out of the ground. Of course this is assuming all goes well.
It was a fascinating process. In our case we didn’t have to really drill that far. How far you have to drill is going to vary depending on how arid it is in the region you are located the terrain itself. In mountainous terrain you might have to drill hundreds of feet. If this is case for you and you haven’t bought your land yet it could potentially save you thousands of dollars if there was already a well on the property.
Once done, we ended up with a 120 gallon holding tank above ground. This tank has a rubber bladder in it that takes up roughly half of the space. This is used to keep the water pressure constant. When we get electricity it will be a simple matter to hook the pump. I will also dig trenches to the house and one to the future garden area so I can run piping for the water.
Here is a picture of the completed well:
You will find as you read this blog that I am an over-engineering fool. I figure if six inch thick lumber is good enough, ten inches is better. There are reasons for this philosophy and sometime I will take the time to try and write them down. While it should have been perfectly acceptable to leave this out in the open for six months while we built the house I wanted to go ahead and cover it somewhat from the weather. In the long run I am going to build a butt and pass 10′ x 10′ shed around it to protect the pump and be a place to store garden implements since the well is pretty close to the garden area.
On the 14th of August we closed on our land. It is 5.01 acres surrounded on two sides by the Blackwater River State Forest. The most noise that we have most of the time is the neighbors donkey who brays about every four hours; that is unless you count the noise of the chainsaw. But hey, an axe takes too long!
Within just a couple of hours after the closing Rachel was out on the land with her father beginning the clearing process. The property is covered by a combination of pines and oaks with smaller numbers of holly and even a magnolia tree that is going to be at the corner of the yard.
While it isn’t an “elegant” picture the following shows some of the trees:
This show mostly smaller pines and the smaller scrub trees, but trust me there are some nice size oaks.
It took several days of extremely hard work to clear a road to the house site. August in northwest Florida can prove to be both very hot and humid!
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Nov.2,2009
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