The First Few Steps
- Laura,
- Jan 3, 2017
- 2 min read
Our driveway is just about to be wrapped up. The land feels open and ready for possibility and also exposed and a bit naked. Now is when it all feels real. We are truly taking concrete steps in our homesteading process and there's no turning back, nor do I want to. I'm feeling bittersweet about change as our land morphs from it's original raw state into a human-touched homestead. There's equal magic in both states, but also sadness in the felling of majestic old pines and white oaks to make space for our expanded footprint. I subscribe passionately to the belief that as much should be left undisturbed on our upper wooded 19 acres as possible. I want to walk out the backdoor of our smallish house each day with Calla and explore every corner in it's natural habitat. Live beside it and learn.
We were so anxious going into this process. It was the one factor in our long list of to-do's that we couldn't put a price estimate on. Would the builders hit rock and need to blast? Would our driveway drain all our current funds beyond the small loan my family had committed to helping us out with? Would the road in end up sitting there for a year while we waited to build our funds back up to build our house with? Luckily, none of these things happened and we can continue to move forward in graveling the road and starting to build while the weather is still somewhat mild.
Every step in this whole process so far has seemed relaxed and right on time in it's process so far. I really thought because we bought our property so late in the fall that we wouldn't be able to get a driveway in until Spring. But the local's (the Sawyer's) who have building our road have exceeded our expectations and been amazing to work with. They didn't seem to mind our curiosity and excitement bringing us over nearly every day of the process to check progress and be apart of it all. They even let us have a 7 kid homeschool adventure up to watch them work with the big track hoe and chainsaw one day.
There was one day of a bit of rock digging at the very bottom, but it was minimal compared to what they've seen in Madison County. Much of the rock crumbled easily just being scraped down by the excavator.
After the second day, everything has flowed smoothly, including an unexpected decent sized batch of old White Pine timber logs to sell to Ramsey's Lumber Yard that will help us pretty much cover the cost of graveling the driveway! See the rest of the process below:
Next we'll be waiting for the homesite grading to be done, a gate put on the driveway, and septic to be dug (although we don't intend on using it for it's traditional purpose). Stay tuned for more updates soon!
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