The Nitty Gritty

The planning stages of this project are starting to get complicated. Ray spent last week on the phone with many of the different people we are going to need to get this thing underway. He called two excavators, the electric company, and a well digger. We are going to be out there next week and plan to meet with them then to get some bids on the work. It is difficult to make appointments with them because, not only do we not have a phone number to give them, we don't have an address. We need a fire number and it costs $25 dollars to get one. Once you pay your money, the city then posts a sign near your driveway, which we don't have yet. The excavator will clear the driveway. As long as he's there with a bulldozer, it makes sense to have him clear the building site and possibly dig the pit for the privy. That means that before we have him do the work, we have a lot of big questions to answer. The well digger can't do his job until we have the building site as well as the privy site settled either. He also needs a soil test to be done before he'll do anything. The electric is also crazy complicated. They will come in and run a line out to our building site and install a temporary meter so we have power to run our tools. That would be very good. They bury the cables out there so the trees don't continually knock out power. We have to provide them with a trench to run the cables in. Sounds like a job for the guy with the bulldozer, right? The only problem with that is they have to bury the cables before November 1, because of the weather. They will also charge us a minimum monthly charge for the power whether we are there using it or not. That makes us think we should wait and get the power drop done in the spring and save a few bucks. This doesn't even begin to address the issue of permits. (Yes, we're pulling permits. . .) Everyone wants their own permit pulled, township, country, state, etc. They weren't kidding when they call this raw land. We are literally starting from scratch and the reality of that is setting in slowly but surely!