Well the septic is finally in after waiting 3 months for the rains to stop... we feel so lucky! Now we are waiting for our excavating contractor to finish the road and get our house pad done. Lately weve been having a good deal of rain which has been keeping them from finishing the road. In any case we are in no major rush other than wanting to make progress...we still have drawings to work on. Here is a picture of the house site. The people you see are walking in where the house will be. You can see the well tanks to the right.

We got an agricultural exempt building permit to build an ag storage building. We are using this to practice the non-load bearing strawbale contruction but also to use for a strawbale storage facility. And a place to rest under shade during contruction. That will be much needed come summer.

Our phone lines are getting installed ... let me clarify that. The phone company is bringing Phone Service to the land...which is totally different then actually getting a phone out there. That wont happend until we get our house done and the main protector box is installed in our house. Mind you this is totally undeveloped land. ;) Its fun stuff...because when it comes to building your own house on undeveloped land you have to kinda do things twice. You have to bring the services there then you have to bring them to your house...often times to separate projects. heh heh. Anyway SBC has been really cool so far, as has PG&E. We are planning on having grid power to the house at least for a while. We will install a full solar array as soon as we get the house built and keep adding modules as we can afford it...hopefully some day we will no longer need the grid power. But for now it will make things easier to get started.

We plan to start building the ag storage structure as soon as the pads get done on the land. I will be posting some basic drawings about that as well soon.

The big project at this point is learning my new CAD software DataCad 10 LT which for 149 bucks is pretty amazing for CAD software. It isnt nearly as feature rich as AUTOCAD but its easy to use and wasnt really expensive. I may still use AUTOCAD for more complex things as I get working on the main house. We have pretty much finalized our main house design, will be posting sketches soon...

Thats all for now...