Week 3: Early Site Work

With a builder selected, construction got off to a quick start in May, driven in part by our desire to get water and power hooked up to the trailer.  It’s getting old, filling the water tank by hand and lugging batteries back to Bellevue to re-charge.  Then our well crapped out (we think it was the old electronics) and we need to make really nice with the Peases to keep using their water.  We can’t drink the irrigation water!  I gave Dave a bottle of wine last weekend – saying they’re the only people I know who can turn water into wine.  Literally.

So what do you do with the well?  Fix the old electronics, or go ahead and advance the work we’ll need to get the well ready to handle the demands of a house – new pump, new electronics, a well house.  We opted for the latter.  And so there we are, filling the water tank one quart pitcher at a time.

Given that our site is so far from the road – an 850-foot stretch - we have to invest a lot to get utilities and water uphill to the house. It’s requiring three transformers, double the connection charge from the PUD, and a huge delay. 

But we’ll have 400amp service at the house, and 200amp service plus a frost-free spigot at the base of the hill, serving the trailer in the short run and a future barn in the long run.

Here’s the road from the first cut (above) to the latest profile (right). When we arrived on the 15^th of June, they had laid 8-12 inches of crushed rock on the road bed. Also, they've cut a drainage ditch on the right hand side to take runoff down the hill.  Quite a difference; it looks like a real road now.

 

Week 4 saw the team trenching to drop water lines, plus 4-5 pipes for power, phone, cable, fiber and one more conduit ‘for what we don’t know yet’ about future technology. Here’s a picture of the trench, right before they closed it up on Friday, June 8.  We’re awaiting the wires to be pulled and a final inspection by the PUD before those can be filled in.  We will wait anywhere up to 6 more weeks for the inspection – a 30-minute visit after which the ground will be filled in and the switch turned on.  And so there we are, entertaining visitors, filling the water tank one quart pitcher at a time.

 

And especially for the little boys in the audience (you know who you are), here's a video of Jeff in the little excavator backfilling the trenches.  And one of his men using what has to be the worst tool in the shed - the soil compactor.