Another Amazing Weekend

Have you ever had one of those times, where you plan things, one way, and it turns out completely different, and it's ok? Well, we just had one of those times..

We were driving down to the property on Friday night because early Saturday morning, we were meeting with a friend who offered to help us lay out the pipes for the sewer system.  Friday afternoon, Jim was at the plumbing store with Brad buying pipes and couplings and all sorts of stuff, so we could get up bright and early Saturday morning, in Panguitch, and drive out to the property and get the sewer system all laid out.

Friday night, while Jim was getting prepared for the drive, the kids and grand kids and I had to make our annual visit to the pumpkin patch.  Jim was chomping at the bit to leave, but the pumpkin patch event had been planned for weeks, and between Melody delivering a baby this next Friday, Brianne's birthday the next week, snow on the horizon, and our window of opportunity to work at Manzanita much longer, was quickly coming to a close, so we couldn't realistically reschedule.

Well, we picked out pumpkins, and went on a wagon ride, and rode ponies, and played in the corn pit.. grand kids had a blast, all went off without a hitch.  I left the party a little early, so that we could get down to Panguitch.

When I got home, Jim was all loaded up, and ready to rock and roll.  We had to make a quick stop to fill up with gas, and another quick trip to storage to pick up... some L shaped things, I don't know what they are.. but, they go into concrete...

This is a shot of 140 feet of 20 foot long pipes on our first time use, extra long trailer.

We fill up with gas, and drive over to storage, and we can't find the things.. As we're looking, it's getting darker and darker and darker, so we finally decide that we should just go on.

We get on the road about 8:30 pm..  start driving... don't get to the hotel until midnight or so... exhausted..  We get into bed, and the hotel is being renovated... there are curtains, but no blinds, and there's a light just outside our door.. The whole room is lit up like 4th of July..  Made it a little difficult to sleep.... Our friend and his wife were in a room a couple down from us, and they experienced the same problem...

After a really restless night sleep, we get up and drive to the property... We got there, and found that the basement had been dug down to the "grade" level.  We had the geo-technical site evaluation done on Thursday and the building permit people are working on the final building permit now.  Here's a shot of our truck parked "in the garage".

So, we have a basement!

AND the trench for the power pole had been dug also.  The piping was put into the trench, and we're now waiting for GarKane Power Co. to come hook it up!

Stoked..  One side of the road looks like this and the other side looks like that.

 

When we got there, we had to mark out where we wanted the house, which included a 30 foot easement that had to be between the front of the house and the road.  We are at 36 feet back officially!  When we originally measured this, we found that the back corner of the house was going to have a tree growing out of it, so we had to dig a little more to the other side of the house so we didn't have to cut down the magnificent 40 foot tall Ponderosa pine tree...  groan... with that done, the house was marked...On to the plumbing map...

Jim had originally designed up a stacked washer and dryer on the main level.  When we realized that reaching for the dried clothes up high was not going to work for me, the washer-dryer was moved down to the basement where we could have full sized side by sides and the plumbing layout had to be changed.

It's good to find these things out before you pour concrete on top of your underground pipes!

So we went down to lay pipes and wound up re-designing the drains when we found that Travis our new excavator/concrete contractor/framer had to lay the concrete forms down and fill in center with about 8 inches of dirt before we set the pipes in place.

The adventure continues. . . .Cheri and Jim.