Cottage Construction Underway

On the way back home from the Spring Photo Weekend in Fairmont I made a brief stop at our property in Nordegg and met with the contractor that we have hired to build our cottage.  My development permit application was recently approved by Clearwater County.  They granted us a relaxation of a couple of bylaws which allows us to build slightly larger than the maximim size, and slightly closer to one property line.  The cottage I have designed totals about 1100 square feet on two levels and the maximum allowable is 990.  We are also supposed to be at least 40 feet from the property line and our cottage is, but the storage building that we are constructing at the same time is only about 35 feet from one of the side boundaries.  With the relaxation granted we are pushing ahead and hope to have the exterior of the buildings complete by fall.

Site clearing got underway in the couple of days prior to my visit and I wanted to see what progress had been made.  The building site is now all cleared as is a 30 foot fire break all around, as required under the bylaws.  The logs have all been bucked up, and excavation will start shortly.  I met with our contractor Scott to quickly review the exact location of the cottage and the storage building.  With everything clear he can now proceed with excavation and eventually with construction.

This winter has certainly been a challenge.  We did not get an excessive amount of snow and although we had a couple of really cold snaps, it was generally fairly mild in between.  But winter seems to just be going on forever and after an early start, just won't seem to quit.  Winter arrived in mid October and stayed.  It is now nearly the end of April and it is still cold and snowing.  There was wet snow coming down while I was in Nordegg, and now in the couple of days since then, there has been more accumulation.  Hopefully this is the end of it for this year...!!
Since my brief stop at the property the excavation of the building site has been completed.  Scott only managed to excavate down to a depth of about 16 inches.  At that point he hit a shelf of solid rock.  This seems to extend under most of the property.  I checked the lot last fall by pounding in a steel rod and hit something solid at more or less the same depth all over.  We did find a bit of a drop off in the rock along one edge which allows us to get a little deeper for our septic tank.  Looks like we will only be able to achieve about 4-1/2 feet of clearance in our crawl space for water storage cistern and hot water heater.  But at least our base will be really stable.  The last picture was taken by Scott after the excavation was completed...