Mother nature has a mind of her own. Congrats on the deal.  Sounds like it is just about time to roll up your sleeves .

Good deal.

We'll be checking them out, Al

Quotewhy isn't the snow melting faster!!

PS Al,  Canada may have hard water... 

Hard water indeed! There's another 3" of the stuff this morning. Grrrrrrrrr.
Mind you it's more squishy cold and slushy than hard but still...

We had it yesterday - now its gone - maybe yours will leave too.

Sadly not  - more forcast for next few days!   

That's a bummer, Al but maybe you can think real hard about it while waiting for the snow to leave. [idea]

Glenn - thinking is always hard ... 

More hard thinking going on ... another foot of snow in the last 24hrs!!! 

Still it has given us time to gather some materials. We can hardly get around the house we are renting for secondhand doors, windows, showers, etc. Kijiji (more popular than craigslist here) is becoming a nasty little vice for me! We have got some great deals from it but I'm getting addicted to bargin hunting! - How many doors and windows do we really need?

The forcast is looking better for the next week though. It's all in + figures so hopefully we will be able to see the ground this time next week and I'll be able to get out and muck around in the mud 

Quote from: Alasdair on March 31, 2009, 09:39:54 AM
More hard thinking going on ... another foot of snow in the last 24hrs!!! 

Still it has given us time to gather some materials. We can hardly get around the house we are renting for secondhand doors, windows, showers, etc. Kijiji (more popular than craigslist here) is becoming a nasty little vice for me! We have got some great deals from it but I'm getting addicted to bargin hunting! - How many doors and windows do we really need?

Oh, man, can I ever relate to all of this!  I have sworn off buying windows at least half a dozen times, and we've been thinking hard (between bursts of furious work) for almost three years.  We thought hard for over three months just waiting to get the paperwork signed on this informal handshake-deal cash-for-land transaction.  We thought hard for another two months after that waiting for the driveway to happen.  Then we thought hard through several of our 7-month-long winters, through a few injuries, through months of saving our pennies to rent the excavator AGAIN, through a carjacking which relieved us of a whole summer's worth of building funds...

And through it all, we've been accumulating doors, windows, bathtubs, bathroom sinks, windows, woodstoves, cookstoves, tarpaper, windows, kitchen sinks, cedar shake siding, windows, stove pipe, shingles, cinder block, windows...you get the picture.  We're musicians who travel a lot, so I start checking the local Craigslist for wherever we're going a few days before we leave.  Get a gig...buy a door.  If we have no gigs, we haunt freecycle and go dumpster diving.  You may imagine what our 360 square feet of living space looks like by now, and I keep joking that if we tarp one more thing and lean it against the shed, the shed is going to slide right off its blocks.

But it's all paid for, we have no debt, a couple of dandy outbuildings, a driveway, a well, a septic system, enough rock to build several miles of stone walls, and at least five years' worth of firewood cut, split and stacked, since digging, cutting, splitting, and stacking are the only things we can always do, money or no money.  We may even get a house up before we're too old to hobble back and forth to the mailbox.

I'll be looking forward to watching your progress, Alasdair.  Mud season can't be that far off.  And repeat after me:  no more windows!

I've been fairly good with windows recently...
We have finally got our building permit and a civic number/address so as soon as we have some pics for show and tell we'll start an owner builder thread
Al