The preparation for building our house has become a real adventure this month! We started the month parked in Dickson at Tanbark Campground.
Jim worked every day for weeks on the big brush pile in the back of the property; cutting up the branches and hauling logs and brush off the area where the secondary septic filed might go someday. That area had to be cleared of brush so that the Environmentalist from the State can see that the ground has not been disturbed.
Linda brought lunch and helped for a few hours most days. We rented a chipper for 4 weeks, so some of the brush was chipped, bigger pieces are being cut or set aside for firewood. The chipper piles got pretty big!
Here’s what the pile out back looked like before we began to work on it.
Here’s what the back pile looked like by the end of the month; still a lot of cutting and chipping needs to be done, but we cleared the stuff off the area where the “duplicate septic field” would go if it is ever needed.
We get occasional visitors on the property – here’s a turkey! We’ve also seen deer and either a fox or a coyote!
Friday May 5, we took the day off from work on the big pile and looked into some of the things we’ll need for the house. Cabinets, brick, doors – lots of decisions to be made!
We left Tanbark Campground in Dickson at 8:15 on Monday morning, May 8, with Acey’s mileage at 97,870.9. Thor has 117, 108 and we might as well add “Heffie” our Nissan Rogue who has 83,943 miles. (She had 80,480 when we got her back from Chris on April 2) Jim parked Acey temporarily in a gravel lot in Pegram and went to work on the property. Linda took Heffie to the Nissan dealer in Dickson to find out what is wrong with the tailgate – it keeps opening by itself as if its haunted or something! Turns out there was a short in the switch that operates the tailgate.
Back to the gravel lot to pick up Acey in the afternoon and moved back to Grand Ole RV Resort in Goodlettsville.
On Wednesday, May 10, we met with the septic system folks and they confirmed that the specific area for the duplicate septic field had been cleared of brush and they flagged where the septic fields should go. Jim texted the agent with the state, and we have been waiting for weeks for her to come back out. Very frustrating, because she is holding up the whole works on getting our project going! We discovered that day that due to the lay of the land and where the septic tank and field(s) need to go, we have to move things around! Our floor plan will basically need to be reversed. Our designer mirrored the plan and had it back to us a week later. Always something! We also will need to change the cabinets for the kitchen and laundry room – at least we had not ordered those yet. The casement windows, which we ordered in January, should work out ok; but some individual placements will need to change. Our plan looked like this:
Now it looks like this:
Friday was predicted to be a rainy day, so we made some phone calls, stopped by Dickson Electric to find out about the temporary service we will need and set up an account. We got shingle samples from our roofer. And we changed some exterior doors that we had on hold from right hand to left hand and ended the day meeting up with Chris and enjoyed some fresh brew at Yazoo.
After church on Mother’s Day we had lunch at Blue Moon Waterfront Grill – a beautiful sunny day to be there!
Some turtles swam by as we ate…
The following weekend, we were able to livestream our niece’s graduation from law school! We are very proud of her accomplishment; congrats to Missy!
Since early April, we have been unable to communicate with the logger that took our trees down. He left a big pile of wood in the front of the property that he said he would take care of “in a couple of weeks” but that had not happened. He has not returned calls or texts for well over a month! Here’s the pile at the front of our property.
The chipper was picked up on the 22nd, so Jim began cutting on the pile up front on the 23rd. We stacked the wood out front and gave it away. It seems lots of folks like to have free firewood, and we need it gone!
We will still have plenty of firewood for our use. After cutting on it for a week, by the 29th, the big pile out front was nearly gone!
There are lots of stumps to be removed – our next project!
The backhoe is sitting approximately where the front bedroom will be – the bulldozer is next to the house.
The chipper had to be jump started a few times, and Heffie got a bit dirty driving to the back of the property, so Chris and Linda detailed it on Saturday.
Tuesday we headed up to Michigan for a funeral. Our brother-in-law Bruce passed away and our nephews Bill and Sean made arrangements for him to be buried next to their mother, Jim’s sister. We arrived in time to meet up with the family for dinner at Olive Garden. Funerals are a bittersweet time for the family to get together.
There was a visitation at the funeral home, followed by a graveside service as we remembered Bruce. 26 years after we lost Gwen, they are reunited in Glory! Praise be to God! Julie and her family had hoped to spend time with her dad this summer while back in the States, but that is not to be…
We left for Tennessee after the service, stopping overnight in Florence KY. When we were within an hour or two from home, we noticed the tire pressure was low on a rear tire, so Jim put the spare on. We do like to try to recycle paper, glass and metal, but not by picking it up in our tire!
The adventures continue; stay tuned for our next update for June!
Progress, slow but steady. Keep it up. Great shot of the wild turkey.
Tom was here!
Where in Pegram is your property??? It looks beautiful, hope things smooth out for you. We built one house, never to be done again! have a great story I found in the paper about waiting for the floor sander.