Building on the brain

It's been a while since I've given a cabin update, mostly because until recently nothing very interesting has been happening with the cabin. I don't know if I mentioned that while we were at camp, we had to make lots of phone calls and drive all over New Mexico to get easements for our power, go to planning and zoning (twice) to get a letter of compliance for the electrical company so they would put up our power poles, go to the NM Environmental Department and listen to a guy talk for an hour and a half about how we can't have a normal septic system and can't drill our own well because the property isn't big enough, and go to the rural 911 place to get assigned an address (they weren't there the first day because they are only open from 8-10 am Monday through Friday, so I went again the next day during that time and they still weren't there, because the guy who does address assigning is also the IT guy for the building and they didn't have a way to page him, and I basically told some random person that I wasn't leaving until someone came to help me, which they finally did. If you think that little story was long, just be glad I spared you the stories that go along with all the other places that I went, namely planning and zoning. But I digress.). Oh yeah, we also drove up to Mora (about an hour away) because that is where the electric co-op is located, to turn in our paperwork and join the co-op. Then another day we drove down to Construction Industries Division in Santa Fe (an hour away in the opposite direction) to apply for our building permit. When we were there, I felt like I was ordering soup from the Soup Nazi. Our contractor had told us to smile a lot and act very humble and ignorant and say really nicely, "Could you look over everything? I'm not sure I did this right," and then pay them their money. Apparently, folks have turned in stuff to CID before and have been denied a permit for kind of silly things because they forgot to cross a t or something. So about a week later we received our permit in the mail, and now it's go-time. Our contractor has cleared our land and begun working, and as soon as the weather dries up a bit he will be pouring the piers for our foundation. We also got our first invoice from him, so this is definitely becoming very real for us. He has instructed us to go to Lowe's or Home Depot to pick out lighting fixtures and ceiling fans, and also to decide what color windows we want. I got the best news today when I called another cabin owner who owns a cabin very close to ours. After one of our neighbors not being interested in sharing their well, and another neighbor saying they wouldn't mind, but it would be really expensive for us because they didn't have a pump installed yet and therefore no electricity going to the well, this guy was my last shot--I asked very nicely if he would be willing to let us share their well, and he said yes. So that is a big load off our minds (plus it will save us a lot of money and we will have running water, always a plus). Also, the well we will be sharing produces 20-25 gal/minute, which the guy said that when the drillers drilled it, they said that was the biggest producing well they had ever drilled in the area.

I had a dream last night that our builder had basically built the cabin in about a week. We showed up, and everything was done, and decorated perfectly. Then I woke up. But hopefully, it won't be too much longer before there is much more progress and we have a cabin!

It's been quite a process so far, making sure everything is done just right, all the paperwork is filled out correctly, and it's still within our budget.

More to come later. Also...we are going up to camp during Labor Day weekend to babysit camp while the caretakers are out of town, so I'll take pictures of the progress then.