Originally posted on 2020-08-02
Hello everyone. I am really sorry for the blog being so sporadic. Life has been crazy in general with both of us working full time and going back and forth with plans not to mention the whole COVID-19. I may write about dealing with that in an isolated (mostly) community and how I know we would have acted differently if we were still in a city in a further blog, but for this one, I want to talk about the new plans and the work we’ve done to move our driveway.
Back in October, I shared plans to demolish the Eastern room of the house and rebuild it properly. Since then, we have decided to instead tear down the entire house and start from scratch. We’ve spent most of the last couple of months making plans in CAD and attempting to finance a rebuild. There will be more on both those subjects in a later blog where I will share the plans. We’ve changed it a few times to come to what is (hopefully) the house we are going to build. One feature I like is that all the bedrooms will be on the side with the lake, but more on that in a later blog.
We would have liked to get started sooner, but with the province shut down, it was impossible to get permits. We are submitting the plans to get permits next week but due to timing, the majority of the work will be waiting for the spring of 2021. This fall we will be doing the things we can, like starting to move the driveway and figuring out where to put everything as we need to live with most of our storage rooms gone. This weekend we started to move the driveway to where it will be in the plan. This involved needing to be very careful as we removed some trees that were near hydro wires with a tractor.
We started by cutting down the thin trees with our chainsaw, but it ran out of fuel with our driveway completely blocked and the cars on the wrong side. This was obviously a problem so we decided to move the trees out of the way with the tractor. What ended up happening is we drove through the trees, hitting them with the bucket, into other trees and they snapped like twigs. This got us wondering, what would happen if we simply drove into the standing trees?
The answer is, you get to have the most fun we’ve had in a long time. The trees come down and very quickly, proving once again that the tractor was one of our better purchases. In the course of an afternoon, we managed to get down most of the trees and take out the stumps. Now we would have been left with a bunch of fallen trees, but thankfully we found for fuel for the chainsaw after the trees were done, and was still able to cut them up and clear the space.
This will make our driveway a little straighter than it is currently. Still not completely straight as that would involve taking out a large tree that we would rather keep. In the near future, we plan to move the one garage to further up the driveway to act as storage as we demolish and rebuild the house. So, this is going to end up documenting something completely different than we thought when we first purchased this property two years ago. We do plan to still use as much of what we have already purchased as possible, like all the windows we purchased last year.
Stay tuned as we progress through this process, probably a little slower than we would like given we are both working, but hopefully regularly again. Thank you for coming with us on this journey.
Huron The Lake 