Sagebrush & Solar

If you’ve followed us since the beginning of summer — we talk a lot about dirt. In fact, I didn’t realize so much of my life would revolve around discussing dirt (or paying insane amounts of cash for dirt – and I’m not talking about that cutesy country song, “Buy Dirt”).

We moved a lot of dirt for our driveway. Hauled in a lot of dirt for the main private road. Moved more dirt for our building pad. Dug up dirt for the house pit. Moved piles of dirt to the driveway. Will be moving dirt back into the pit for backfill. And now, trucking in even more dirt for our driveway. Our naive road and driveway budget initially was about $10-$12k. There’s no way it will be that much, but I’d rather overestimate, haha!” we laughed to each other. Now that we are sitting at about $18k (!!!) for our road and driveway projects, we aren’t laughing anymore.

This will hopefully be the last of this project. Keith has many hours and days ahead of him on the tractor, pushing dirt and enjoying the cool fall temperatures. Our local gravel pit will be delivering pit run for two days. This is a nonnegotiable for our driveway, as it’s a soupy, swampy, muddy mess if there is any type of precipitation.

On Sunday, our dogs escaped. They were scooped up and taken to dog jail (the Humane Society) on Monday afternoon. Our search for them took up all of Sunday. This started our week with a fair amount of stress and anxiety — while we held out hope, we also held onto a health dose of realism — we are surrounding by miles of nothing (and coyotes), roads, and ranchers who may very well shoot a dog threatening their livestock. They were on the run for 30 hours before someone picked them up about 10-15 miles away.

On Monday, our flooring guy called us and advised the hangers did not fit the joists. There was miscommunication with the joist company, so we are waiting on new joists to continue the flooring project. This will resume on Wednesday. They were able to construct our pony walls, though.

Hopefully by the end of this weekend, we have subfloors, the beginning of exterior walls and a nice, drivable driveway.