Starting our earth sheltered cabin | Page 5 | Construction and DIY projects | Forums

went out yesterday and some progress was getting done

http://www.youtube.c.....DyQpngReaY

Well went out this morning because he had a few questions about how I wanted it finished, starting to look like something, huge drop off on the top right corner of about 5 feet, so he's going to dump some more loads and feather it out and said he should be finished tomorrow, I told him we were going to be gone all weekend but will come out on Monday to check it out and give final approval before he moves his equipment, I'm starting to get excited, plus the wood cutter cleared out more trees so the woods are really starting to open up and I can see the lay of the land better

so we went out yesterday to take a look at how the driveway and pad came out. My wife had not been out to the land since we had started cutting and working on the site. I told her on the way out that where we had originally talked about putting the cabin would not work out.

Silence

uh oh

so we had to move it because of being so close to the water and not being able to clear the trees we wanted and the amount of fill it would take to build a driveway and pad.

silence

I'm in trouble

So we headed up the road and came around the corner and her only response was holy shit.

wasn't sure if that was a good holy shit or a bad holy shit. The change in the look of the land is quite startling

So we got out and started walking around, the guy who had put in the drive and pad was there, and me and him talked about how much fill and stuff he had to use as my wife just kept looking around. He ended up using 300 yards of gravel which was quite a bit more than anticipated.

My wife commented how it isn't as private from the road as she had hoped. I told her that we can address that buy planting some screening trees like the giant thujas we had at the house. To be honest though, the only real issue would be snowmobiles and hunters. The road is currently closed to all motored vehicles besides snowmobiles and we are going to put up no hunting and trespassing signs all along our property. A hunter would have to walk almost 3/4 of a mile up the road before they come across any land that is not posted, then if they did get a deer, they would have to drag it out 3/4 of a mile, since they aren't allowed to bring a vehicle in.

Plus, we own the road, if there was any issues with snowmobilers, we could just shut down the trail if we had to resort to that.

I told her our two options for the cabin being the round cordwood and the firetower, the cordwood would give the most privacy, because it would be earth sheltered. It would be all back filled with a earth roof and from the road it would look like a small hill.

The fire tower we could make very secure with shutters and so forth. The firetower also would give her more of the views she wanted.

She walked around for a couple minutes more and said, I like it.

Sweet!

So she finally decided, fire tower it is

I got to run out today to take some measurements and stuff, I will get some pics or vid, it really came out good.

the price came out to 3500 which is 500 more than his higher end estimate, but I'm fine with that. We also got our first check for a couple of loads of pulp wood and firewood hauled out which came to about 800 dollars. So at this point we are negative 2700. The goal is to end up even with what we get from selling the wood and building the cabin. Not sure if we are going to hit that.