I still spend a lot of time on the Door County Land Information site, looking at our lot's elevation contours (for the ski run, of course), easements, road setbacks ... and just seeing our name legally attached to a piece of the peninsula.
After doing a little more digging, I learned that this picture is taken in early spring every two years, so I got lucky putting some human activity on camera. Two years from now, hopefully, the MVC will be visible from space, too.
Here's the satellite pic from spring, 2021. If I had to bet, I'd say this year's picture was taking earlier in the day, with the shadows being cast to the west (the left of the picture). The 2021 picture has shadows casting to the north (the top of the picture).
Back in February I had an itchy trigger finger and felled a bunch of trees to beat the wind. Last weekend I worked from can-see to can't-see to clean it all up. Prized timbers were marked for milling, and Tim Bittorf of Bluffside Services (920-495-8482) is taking the rest away, for wood chips and toilet paper.
It may not look like it, but we're getting close to having Nick's team at Lily Bay Sand & Gravel — the winners of the sitework bids — come to scrape the building site and remove all the stumps. They won't be thrilled, but I'll be onsite for that, grabbing as many unearthed stones as possible for our foundation and patio. Lots more to come soon.
Back in the fall of 2022 we thought we'd settled on a slab-on-grade foundation. It seemed like the easiest and most inline with MVC principles.
After some more research and back-and-forth with our builder, we've pivoted and decided to go with a crawlspace foundation. There are several reasons:
Mistakes will be made. It will be a lot easier to fix them with a chase under the MVC than with things cast in concrete. This I am sure of.
We are getting old. An appeal of the slab-on-grade was the notion of simply using the slab as our floor. But standing on concrete sucks, especially as cartilage has become thinner (or non-existent). A forgiving wood floor on top of a forgiving wooden floor truss — combined with Hush Puppies and Dr. Scholl's inserts — will make everyone happier and healthier.
We can put some mechanicals down there. We're not sure what, exactly, quite yet. But given the MVC's petite 24x36 figure, even an additional square foot is precious.
Here's the drawing for the crawlspace subslab. Once this is in place, 3" of rigid insulation goes on the interior of the foundation walls, and then a 4" slab is poured on top of the 10mm poly (the yellow part).
OG readers of this site will recall the Xanax and Valium-hazed* felling of a big red oak back in September.
In December I had the oak (and a bunch of other hardwood) timbers taken to the only female sawyer in WI, who's just 5 miles away.
What you're supposed to do at this point is trailer your lumber back to your site for air drying. A forklift loads the trailer. But Door County received a bunch of ❄️ in February that made that impossible. So I used the brute force method that recalled Door County settlers: I hand-loaded it all into the back of the Land Cruiser (4 trips!) and then shoveled out nearly 2 feet of snow in two spots to stack and sticker it. It was just an insane amount of work that had me considering Lumber Liquidators.
It'll all be worth it. It's wide and pretty and there's enough flooring to knock out most of the main level. This is what I'm telling myself.
Our wide-plank oak flooring has landed. I'm not gonna lie. I should've popped a couple of Valium or Xanax — or maybe both — before taking this oak down. While I have been prepping for it all week, reviewing my previous experience in my mind, and re-reading key verses of the tree-felling Bible, there is no getting around the anxiety of felling a 20" diameter tree. Unless you do this for a living, it's big and scary. Anyone who says otherwise is full of shit.
It all went pretty well. I didn't die. I did make a rookie mistake by not making a relief cut before lopping off the first 8' 6" section once it was on the ground, which caused the split you see. I can't imagine making that mistake again.
Later this year it's all headed to Henschel Sawmill, just a few miles away on Townline Rd. It's famous for being the only female-operated sawmill in Wisconsin. Jamie Henschel is awesome and I look forward to having her mill all our timber.
