More Block Laid!

The guys were here at 7:00 this morning and worked til 4:00. Making progress. 

Horse Trails

One reason we fell in love with this property was the horse/4-wheeler trails already on the property.  We always trailered our horses to Chickamauga Battlefield to ride and it was a long way there and very dangerous for horses on I-75.  Here we can ride our horse on our property without leaving and enjoy being safe with them at home.  Here are a few pictures of the trails.

Laying the Block

As you saw in my earlier post, the block, sand and cement were delivered on Friday, August 30th.  Today they laid the block only in the back corners.  The yard is a total mess and is making me crazy but I know it is just temporary.  A side note:  Once our house is built we will only have about a 10 minute grass cutting session.  Woo Hoo!!  We have a center island with trees and moss and a little grass along our driveway.  The horse pasture is kept cut by the horses.  At our other house, it took one person about 6 hours to cut, trim out and weed eat!  The only issue we have in the fall is leaves and a ton of them - living next to the Cherokee National Forest has its pros and cons.  We do have a large leaf vacuum we attach to our mower that sucks them up.  Okay, back to the blocks - here are some photos of the site today that got me kinda crazy.  LOL

Barn Quilt Square in the Making

As we could not afford to purchase a custom barn quilt square, we opted to make our own.  Rawson cut the plywood and mounted it on a frame.  The square is 6' x 6' and weighs a ton.  I had to choose a rather simple quilt pattern and am using the same color red as the barn and a blue a shade darker than the garage.  I know a guy who has a sign business in Cleveland and he is going to bring his boom truck over and help us lift it and mount it to the barn.

Primer 

Background color is tan

Construction Begins - Finally!!!

The footers have been poured!!  Yippie!!  We have waited for this for so long!!  It's hard for me to visualize but I know it will start to come together soon.  If you will look closely, you will see Gertie and Lucy.  They were a big help!

 

Footers are poured

 

 Block has been delivered

 

My girls, Caroline and Chancey, modeling the block.

 

Surveying for the Layout of the House

Surveyors came out to stake the layout of the house.  The trailer was not in line with the garage so we basically ran a line across the front of the garage and out into the place we want to build the house.  This way the back of the house was at the same angle as the garage and gave the house a slight angle as well.  It will come pretty close to our driveway but we don't use the "turnaround" part of the driveway that often.  At least if it's raining, Rawson can pull the truck close to the porch and drop the groceries off at the front door.  And yes, he does buy groceries and has for 22 years!

The Dream Begins

Now that the trailer is gone we had to have a few trees cut down. We were able to cut one down ourselves but had to have a tree service cut the rest. A couple of trees just needed to be topped and the limbs cut back. The trees, which were approximately 80 feet tall, were cut down on a Friday and we cut them up and burned the limbs and all was done by Sunday. We do have the biggest tree to haul off but it was so big around that we are doing a little at a time. We are gonna make a planter out of part of it and log seats and tables to go around our campfire we use to roast weenies and marshmallows. Enjoy the pictures and imagine the sweat dripping off our faces as we stood by a blazing fire burning trees.

 

House Plans - Old and New

After careful interviewing of builders and a lot of "word of mouth," we found an awesome builder named Chris Fontenot.  Chris is a Christian man and we liked him from the moment we met him.  Chris has built homes for a few people that Rawson knows.  Chris took us to see one of the homes he was building and it was beautiful!  Chris came out prior to moving the trailer and sat down with us to discuss our vision for our farm and what we had in mind for a house.  As we had found our dream home plans several years ago, we were basically ready to go.  However, once we had an architect draw the house on paper, we realized that after 4 years of never once swaying from those plans, that it was NOT our dream house.  We had the architect remove some of the costly craftsmanship style accents and by then it basically looked like a house in a subdivision in town.  It was not a country farm house and would have looked awful.  Looking back, I don't know what we were thinking!  I am SOOOO glad we had a change of heart.  Here is a picture of that house:

But, after realizing that we would be better off with a 2-story house both space-wise and for the future when the kids leave, we chose a nice 2-story farmhouse with a lot of character.  We will paint it Woodlawn Juniper to match the garage with white trim, Sundried Tomato front doors and a silver metal roof.