The timbers have arrived!

We settled on building our timber frame with Eastern Hemlock rather than Douglas Fir. The fir is beautiful and the natural color is more to our liking but the sticker price (nearly double) was pretty hard to justify. Additionally, the fir would have been trucked from the west coast and the hemlock is harvested within a few hundred miles of here and distributed by a sawmill 20 or 30 minutes from our house site.

More Site Prep

We have now gone nearly two full months in the middle of peak snow season without any major snow storms. The two feet or so that we had from early January has largely melted away and is at most 6 inches or so in the woods. We have taken the opportunity of the minimal snow cover to do some serious site prep. Taylor construction, the company that put in our road last summer has dug our septic field and will be finishing that as well as bringing in nearly 60 dump truck loads of fill to even out our house site. We are doing the foundation grading work now to allow it a few months to settle before we pour 200 cubic yards of concrete on it for our giant monolithic slab. Here are a few pictures from the work that has been going on, the best of which (and Lorien witnessed this) was when a dump truck got stuck trying to leave the site and the excavator just pushed him out... excavators have to be the coolest tools ever invented.