Getting started.

OK friends. We have been promising a blog and managing only minimal picture posts on our Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/61764597@N00/sets/72157605008928950/

This will not repeat all of those early images, and I'm really not sure if I'll be able to keep both things up, but I am trying, after many false starts, to "blog" the construction of the house on the land we call Spyhop. A first false start on this blog was on another site that I found very difficult to navigate. http://bdohrn.blog.noodle5.com/about/

At that link there is a silly little piece, written mostly when we returned from Mexico to get the news that we had finally succeeded in getting permission to build on this land. Check it out if you want to read a little about the whale watch trip to Mexico. Idea was to artfully link to why we gave this land the name "Spyhop," but it didn't happen to come together because like everyone today, I have a limited attention span, I guess.

In any case, I'm going to use some words and a lot of pictures and hope that it will be interesting enough so that some of you will look and give us some moral support through what is about to be a very demanding project....

Like I said, there are more earlier pics on Flickr.

After over a year of hiking up ( about 400 ft of vertical climb from the start of our driveway) – a good workout) to our preferred building spot, almost immediately after we were able to close on the land we started working on clearing a driveway and getting a better sense of the building site, in high hopes of being able to build this summer.

We had a visit from Susan Allee, and some perfect whether to go with it!
As many of you know, I had been working on a set of plans for a house on this site, hoping all along that it would amount to more than an exercise, but protesting that it would have been a great learning experience, if indeed it DID become only an exercise. So once the land came through, it was time to get an engineer into those plans, so that they could be submitted for a building permit. Permit application day was pretty exciting.




We also enlist ed help from Lydia Marshall & Robert Drucker -- primo architects and cousins of Jennifer's, to evaluate our plans, and particularly how to place the house on our site.



In the meantime, while all that was going on, we were also "house shopping" for something we could live in on the land. Originally we were thinking we'd build something that would eventually serve as my shop, but in the short term might work as a kind of studio apt for us. But as things developed it became clear that while we had good vision for where the house should go, our confidence on how another building should be sited fell apart . I n addition, it just seemed like too much to have to build a prelim. building before getting started on the house.... so it came to be that we purchased a 1975 "Homette." I kid you not!



Getting it up the driveway and ultimately to our spot on the hill was adventurous, to say the least. But we made it.















So, there's more to show and tell, including the tale of learning to operate the forklift, but that'll have to wait until tomorrow. This is the start. From here, it'll be short and pictureful, and I'm hoping some of you will write back now and again. Maybe you can do this through the blog, but you know, there's the old fashioned e mail thing too =; -)


For now I'll leave you with the view from the window in this funky mobile home study!