Construction Journal for 1991

LOG OF LOG HOME BUILDING ACTIVITIES

12/10/90 Ellen and I read a book called "The Education of Little Tree". The book was recommended by Kalimba and it contained the story of the childhood of an Indian boy. In it were vivid, beautiful images of a log cabin in the mountains. After reading this, Ellen said that she would like a log cabin in the mountains, so I told her to start looking for property, and we would build one.

2/?/91 Ellen found an ad in a paper for property for sale in Plain, WA. Neither of us knew anything about Plain, so we drove up there to look at it. We didn't like Plain, but we loved the look of the Lake Wenatchee area. We saw a lot of property for sale with Earl Landin as the realtor. When we got home, we called Earl and told him what we were looking for. A little later, he sent us a list of several properties that we might be interested in, and we made an appointment to go up and see them.

2/16/91 We met with Earl, looked at several properties, and almost as an afterthought, he told us about a four acre piece that had just come on the market. They didn't plow the road to it so if we wanted to see it, we would have to walk a quarter mile or so through the snow. We agreed, walked through the snow, saw the property, loved it, and accepted the seller's terms on the spot.

3/15/91 We closed the deal on the Lake Wenatchee property.

5/18-19/91 Ellen and I attended a two day class on log house building put on by Skip Ellsworth at his enormous log house situated between Monroe and Duvall. It was a fascinating, fun, and informative class. Ellen took 50 pages of notes and we both learned a lot of things we didn't know before. It gave us the confidence that we would be able to build a log house by ourselves. As a result of attending the class, we became members of Skip's Log Home Builders Association of America which meets once a month at Skip's place. We went to a few of these meetings where we exchanged log home building information with other log home builders.

8/2/91 Went with Leonard to buy a second hand stove and refrigerator for the eventual log house. They are stored in our garage in the meantime.

??/??/91 On various trips to the property, I blazed trails through the woods. Initially this was to establish the property lines. It took three full days of clearing to establish the line between our property and the adjoining piece owned by Dick Tutino. Bob Burton helped me on the third of these days.

When this was done, it was clear that the creek that was roughly on this boundary came off of our property, ran onto Tutino's property, and then back onto ours. On a later visit, Dave discovered that the creek originated at a spring that was on our property. This was a fact that was unknown to the previous owner, or by Earl Landin. I think this was lucky for us. There was still an old three inch iron pipe coming out of the spring which was used by the original settlers of the place for their water supply.

On later visits, I blazed a trail to get up to the spring, and then a second trail which was my best guess as to the route to run the water pipe from the spring to the building site. I called this trail the "Pipe Trail".

The building site we chose was a clearing on top of a big rock that has a beautiful view and a lot of exposure to the sun.

12/27/91 Ellen, Aziza and I went up to the property and surveyed the "pipe" trail up to the spring. We had dinner at the Squirrel Tree Inn and spent the night at the Cougar Inn. The next day,

12/28/91, we finished up the surveying of the "pipe" trail. This is the trail that is close to the intended route of the pipe (or pipes) that will bring the water from the spring to the building. The trail follows the contours so that it continually goes downhill-at least that is the intent.

12/30/91 Called the Department of Ecology and asked them to send us the forms for applying for a Water Right for using our spring as a domestic water source.



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