Driveway gravel progress

Couldn't resist a drive out to the property after work, for a peek at how much progress had been made on the gravel. Wow what a difference a day makes.

The driveway entrance is nice and level:

Hey look, it's a driveway:

Here's the two stumps again, with me standing next to them for scale:

They didn't get all finished today; here you can see the fine layer on top here in the foreground, with the rough base layer in the background:

This is the tail end of the current driveway; this is actually going north, and the well site will be on the far end of the road fabric:

There are several large piles of debris that will need to be disposed of later. I'll just have the kids chop these up some weekend...yeah that'll work... :

In other news, we received a proposed/pre-approved drainage plan from the county on Saturday. Our contractor stopped by to look it over and said it looked good. We went and got it notarized this evening and I will go into Seattle tomorrow to have it recorded at the county courthouse.

Driveway preparation

We've been working with a contractor on prepping our house plans and submitting everything to the county. I'll talk more about all that later, but for now I wanted to put a few random pictures up.

Here's the "lane" left by the surveyors last summer, with a sign left by the septic contractor; this is looking west from the eastern property line, and gives you an idea of how thick some of the brush is:

My son and I standing in front of the future driveway entry point, again looking west:

We spent several hours in January flagging the proposed driveway location, using a compass and 300' tape measure. This was a lot of fun: taking bearings from a known (surveyed) point then and walking a certain distance in that direction - I was having flashbacks to my days in the Marine Corps. I am however ashamed to admit that despite my USMC training, our efforts the first day were wasted because I had forgotten to correctly set the compass' magnetic declination for our location, and we had to go back and do it again the next day. The county inspector approved the driveway location on the first try, so I guess we didn't do too badly in the end.

Last week the grading contractor was on-site doing the rough work on the driveway; he made a lot of progress I thought. This next picture was taken from the same viewing point as the above picture; big difference!

The driveway is pretty long at about ~300' feet, and has some gentle curves in it. Here it goes between two old cedar stumps left over the property's old logging days:

Next week we are scheduled to have a bunch of dump trucks come out and spread rock and gravel on our new driveway. After that the well driller will be coming out - there's no city water out here folks!

Wetland delineation and identification

For those of you who don't live in the Seattle area, be aware that King County imposes a pretty high degree of regulatory requirements on anyone who wants to build a home. These requirements sound great in the abstract, ie for protecting the environment on the other guy's property, but can be frustrating when you're the one dealing with it. I am just venting because there is nothing really you can do about, gotta live by the king's rules.

We started the first step last summer, by hiring a wetlands consultant (Altmann Oliver Associates) to mark the location and type of wetlands present on the property. John Altmann did a great job in my uninformed opinion; it was late summer time, and the vegetation was thick, but despite this he was quickly able to map the edges of the various wetlands. First he did a rough survey just to get an idea of what we were looking at. This is what the rough sketch looked like:

(The red line and circle was from me taking an initial crack at possible driveway and home locations...)

After that, John went back out to do the precise flagging of the wetland boundaries. I went with him on one of his trips; it was quite interesting but the guy sure knows how to move fast through brush; he really ran me ragged out there! Watching him work, it seemed like more of an art than a science; he showed me some tricks, like looking for certain types of vegetations (ferns are a clear-cut sign of moist or wets soil, I learned), or dark patches of soil, or using an augur to take a short core sample. We ended up with ~110 flagged locations, and a determination of the wetland types. (If you are interested, the official state manual for wetland determination can be found here.)

Next step was to hire a surveyor to map the exact location of the wetlands. We chose GeoDatum and arranged the work via email; a few weeks later, we had the survey done. A nice side-benefit was that the surveyors hacked some lanes into the brush to be able to reach the interior of the property; this made it easy for us to get in there as well.

Here is a screen capture of the Autocad file delivered by the survey company:

You can see that John and the survey company did actually have to go onto the properties to the north and south of us, in order to get an accurate representation of the wetlands...sorry guys!

After the survey was done, it was back to John to prepare the Critical Areas Ordinance pkg submission. This was the formal application to the county asking them to certify the precise wetland areas and types, as determined by John. Getting this certification is required before you can develop your property. It took a few weeks of waiting, but eventually the county mailed a letter saying they agreed with the submission, and we could go ahead and record the wetlands on the property title (the results are considered valid for five years).

I've described it in a few short words here, but this whole process required several months and quite a bit of money. Once you have the final wetlands delineation certified, this tells you roughly where you can or cannot build your house. Although the western fifth of our lot was classified as essentially a solid wetland and there was another large wetland in the northeastern corner, there was plenty of room in the middle of the property for our needs, and a reasonable path for a driveway coming in from the eastern property line.

A new project begins...

We're starting a new adventure, and here's a new blog to go with it. My wife and I are building a new home - an adventure indeed! No, we are not planning to pick up any hammers or saws - we have hired a general contractor who will be handling all of those details. The planning process has proved to be quite intense and time-consuming, even without participating in or managing the actual construction process. None of these comments will come as a surprise to anyone who's built a home before, I'm sure.

Our property is a relatively large (20 acres), rural wooded lot located in the Tolt River Highlands (TRH) area in King County, Washington State. TRH is located roughly to the northeast of Carnation, WA, and south of Lake Joy. The Tolt River lies to the south. We bought the property over ten years ago directly from Weyerhaeuser; previously the area had been managed as a Douglas Fir plantation, but has since been all sold off to private home owners. Buying the land initially consumed all of our available finances, so at first we couldn't do anything with it; later on when it became more feasible, we still decided to wait rather than move our children while they were in junior high and high school. Our son is graduating this year from Bothell High School, and so now we're building finally. Once the home is built and we've moved in, we don't ever plan to move again (famous last words, I know, but still - that's the plan!).

Finally, for those of you that found this site from my Farrier F22 building project, Jay's F22, hello and welcome. Hopefully you may now understand some of the reasons for my slow progress on the F22 this past six months...but in case you're wondering, no I have definitely NOT given up on boatbuilding; quite the contrary actually. Our new property obviously has a lot of available space, and someday I would like to build a big enough shop or barn so that I can entertain thoughts of building a larger boat.* Maybe an F44...this just wouldn't have been possible in my old backyard in the Bothell house! (And you know, I've got that "Jay's F44" blog url reserved just in case, it would be such a shame to let it go to waste... :-)

(* Yeah, I know I could build any size of a boat under a greenhouse tarp tent.....but that makes for a miserable building experience, guess I'm just not motivated enough for that)