Finally - Permits!

Ready, Set, Permits and GO!

We finally got our permits from the county, and with that, the rights to start construction. We mobilized into the site this week with our dirt guys (Orcas Excavators) and they got right to work. I always love starting a new project, but when you get to do some clearing and grading work, the site changes drastically by the hour. There are so many things falling, piling and moving. In our case, here at Deer Harbor, we had to clear out a bunch of small trees that appear to have grown after the big storm of 1989, where winds reached over 100mph and basically knocked down all the old trees that were here before. We love trees, but we have to make space for our new home, and of course we will replant many trees and plants at the end of our project to establish new growth, it just won't be a tangle of small, mostly unhealthy, damaged fir trees. We are allowed to burn the trees and vegetation onsite, but we opted to haul away to the recycler to be converted into mulch. Burning is less expensive, but rarely makes your neighbors happy, and it just doesn't seem like the right thing to do!

Now, that we have a clean dirt area to start our home, we have to find our grades. We are making the area of the home flat, so we can get to work on the foundation!

Meanwhile, it was a very sunny couple of days with hiking and playing on the beach, it didn’t feel like December has begun. As the schools are still online, we rented a house on Orcas Island close to our future home, a place to stay for us and our crew that will be coming out in the near future.

We also managed to get a few Christmas trees for our crew onsite from the tops of the trees with cones on them, so they are quite interesting!