house

in the summer of '03 the szuplats purchased property on 12 vacation lane.

found here will be details of putting a structure up

written mostly by erica and photographed a lot by ben, however like most things in life there are exceptions....

for instance ben wrote that last useless sentence.

the szups closed on the land on july 8th. ben and erica dove in with enthusiasm, a weedwhacker with a heavy chopper blade, and a pitchfork and cleared the land. before this, it was so thick you couldn't really walk thru it. the stake in the foreground approximately locates the northwest corner of the house.

erica stands before the initial brushpile, now twice this high and three times as wide at least. ben was a good grasshopper and learned the ways of the chainsaw. we of course offer great and humble thanks to the tree godesses and fairies of the wood for letting us in their home.

the menfolk (l to r: clayton, stach, ben) pause momentarily to ponder the hairy situation of an uncooperative tree threatening to take down some power lines.

the elder szups have kindly donated their aging picnic table to the job site. as evidenced by the cooler, peg was getting a jump on her duties as coffee and snack provider.

clayton gets in touch with his inner tree. the above photos were taken the weekend of august the 22nd. chainsaws were wielded by clayton and ben while erica , jen, stach and peggy hauled tree parts to brush and log piles. due to technical difficulties photos of jen were unavailable at this time.

as one can see by the date on this photo, on september 11th we got our building permit. this was a little sooner than we expected and we aren't complaining. we expected a tedious, lengthy and mysterious bureaucratic process that would force us at some point to light candles and pray at the altar of the gods of committees, boards, fees and inspectors.

the state of the land mid -september while we try to get a driveway carved out (property at an incline on several angles) so that we may deport our brushpiles and make way for our excavators and ensuing caravan of contractors. this party train should begin in about two weeks.

this is our very own woodstack. we designed a wood stove into the house plans but will wait to install it until after we have moved in. at the end of the week of sept. 12th, we learned that our surveyor had "missed" some neighboring wells in plotting our septic system. we actually expect these sort of inanities and simply went to pick up our new set of drawings so that we can clear more trees. as it turns out, the driveway is still not carved and all of our myriad mountains and caves of brush are now on the spot where the septic must be dug. as this is the biggest surprise yet, we are doing fine. we also ordered our windows at the home depot amongst crazed hurricane expectees. we were told people were stocking up on plywood and all the generators had been sold out. lucky for us the only thing people wanted to do with the windows that day was think about putting tape across them. we even get a $100 gift card for buying so many dollars in anderson window products. we are reeling with the thousands of options on how best to support our porch and how best to tyvek and seal our windows. apparently there is no end to different techniques on how to do this.

9/21 Hopefully this will be the last photo of tree devastation and the next will be of actual construction. it is clear that we have lost some interest in separating the larger tree trunks from he smaller "brush." we don't have a driveway yet and so haven't discarded the brush. ben and i added to our woodpile and brushpile as we cleared what we hope to be the last trees for the re-designed spot for the septic. stach has contacted the electrician and we cleared the spot for the electric box. the surveyor has marked the accurate corners of the house (stakes with pink tags) and we anxiously await a monday morning phonecall from our excavator. we spent a couple of nights this week trying to figure out the major tub/shower fixtures to go in our bathrooms. one shower and one tub upstairs and a shower downstairs? a clawfoot tub with cramped shower in one downstairs and a large shower upstairs? stach has some nifty old sinks from the thirties that we think we might use. i also took the re-drawn septic pland to town hall for approval and was told that we can't have a well. this was a little troubling to me. we aren't planning a well because the town already told us we couldn't have one. we are going ahead with drawings and getting estimates for the cost of bringing town water up to our property at a distance of about 200 ft. in any case, it sometimes makes you wonder who's in charge of making all the rules after all. i pointed out to the nice town hall folks that the wells were clearly on the neighbors' properties and there was no well on our plot. they thanked me for my superb visual and map-reading abilities and sent me on my way. (-erica)

9/22 There is a half hour left of summer. We hope to be having a hole by the end of the week. We are prepared to make confident decisions regarding bathing modules. In lieu of more recent pics, I offer you my cut leg. It was really just a scratch back in the early clearing trees days (but its nice and bloody) and i still have a nice lil scar. -(erica)