Wellcroft Building Updates

We traveled a lot to the Pacific Northwest and continued to do so during this pre-building phase. We almost always stayed with Butch's parents in their basement. Joe and Sharon never realized what they were getting into when they offered to help us.  SEPTEMBER 2022 There was always something that Butch felt needed to be done at the land. Many trees had been knocked over to build a road and to clear for the well. Although the logs were neatly piled up, the slash was not. If left uncovered over the rainy winter, it would never burn well. So it had to be covered with a huge tarp and tied down.  This was also the trip Butch decided he had to have a chain saw. You can't cut up slash to make it fit under a tarp if you don't have a chain saw! It's also the trip Butch discovered how to break a new chain saw. Then he figured it out how to get it back to working order. JANUARY 2023 Butch and I went again to Washington in January. We did a house switch with Gavin, Ranae's so...

 THE HAND OF GOD I get nervous talking about how much things are costing these days. I'm sure you can relate. The pre-COVID world was not prepared for the post-COVID cost increases. The domino effect of supply problems and inflation and the cost of lending has beat us up throughout this building process. In an earlier post, I mentioned that we should have taken drastic action in 2017 to do something with the timber resources on our land. Perhaps we should have just started building immediately too. It might have saved us a boatload! Hindsight is indeed 20/20! That ship, as they say, has sailed. We got a taste of what prices and delivery of goods could be like when we remodeled the bedroom and bath on Kathryn Cove in early 2020. We experienced less-than-stellar workmanship and somewhat shady contractors. So we thought we had been trained and seasoned. We thought we were better prepared to take on a building project like Wellcroft. No! We weren't! In short, the estimate we got fr...

  TIME TO GET THE PERMIT(S) The permitting office of our county is much like a house of mirrors. Once you get in it is almost impossible to get out. We were dreading this part more than any other aspect of the building process to date. It has been a waiting game from the start.  SITE PLAN $$$ Early on, before we dug a well or submitted application for any permits, we had to make a site plan and have it approved by the county. On the plan we finally submitted there was some discrepancy about where the stream actually flowed. This was somewhat comical because we got the stream placement directly from the county website! We just waited that one out, and sure enough, after a few months the issue blew over. The trick with the site plan was that it had to have the placement of the septic and well, each with its own requirement of so many feet from the house, the property boundaries, the well, the stream, etc. ad nauseum. Butch worked on that for months. And after even more waiting w...

  WASHINGTON IS WET! Having lived in the Southwest, we had grown accustomed to drier climates. But Washington is wet! Our neighbor to the east had, for years, been draining his seasonal watershed onto our land right where our house needed to go. Butch had to redirect that flow of water south onto state lands. He used the clay that the well-drillers dug up to block the old drainage that went to the right, and then he made a new channel to direct the water to the left onto the state lands directly south of us.  Old and new drainage.      Removing logs for new drainage. When Landon and Kyle visited Wellcroft in June of 2022, they helped us with moving rocks and clay in the wheelbarrow to block the old channel. I don't know how I missed getting a picture of Kyle digging out the new channel. (Sorry, Kyle.) He worked really hard, like he had experience and knew what he was doing!! As I have mentioned in previous posts, Butch was ecstatic about the land. (Understa...

GETTING THE BUILDING- BALL ROLLING STARTING WITH A WELL In the fall of 2021 we hired a well-driller. We had no idea it would take so many months to actually get a well. Plus, the cost of the well had increased 25% from pre-pandemic estimates. Additionally, we had to put in a gravel road for their heavy equipment, a $30K expense for which we had  not  planned. First we had the path to the well site widened in the fall of 2021. But this, we were told, was not enough. This is the road we had to build to the well site to support the heavy drilling equipment. It was started on May 3. When the digging rigs showed up on May 26, Butch hopped a plane so he could see it for himself. It took several days to finally reach it, but on June 1, 2022 we finally found water at 366 feet deep. TA-DA!! After eight months and tens of thousands of dollars we got our well. But we still haven't tasted the water!

     SEARCHING FOR A BUILDER Before the pandemic we started looking around in the Bremerton area for a builder. We considered:     1. Modular homes - the company we liked most was not available in Washington     2. Building companies - Coval, Hi-Line, and Armstrong, all had nice models, but any changes to their floor plans were expensive. When we left the Coval meeting, Butch said he never wanted to go back. I asked him why, and he answered,  "That salesman was so smooth that he could have sold me on anything!"     3. We had one company come look at our property, two brothers, but they were just too slick and quick to say what we wanted to hear. Even still, we drove to Port Orchard to visit one of their newly build homes. We were shocked to see the lack of craftmanship in the display home of which they were obviously very proud. (?)     4. Ranae came through again for us. She had worked with a woman who was married to a reputab...

 What Have We Done? It took about six months for the joy and elation to give way to feeling responsible for overwhelming tasks and duties and deciding next steps. We had heard horror stories about the permitting office in our county. And there were so many regulations for small land owners. (Duh! Washington!) It made our heads swim. We found out that properties under 10 acres have more stringent rules about logging. Ummm, too late now! When we finally decided in 2020 that we should try to log the timber we had a pandemic. We discovered that what looked like to us to be lots of trees and good logs, seemed to the area loggers not even worth the bother! Those dollar signs we saw in our heads when we thought of selling our timber flew out the window never to be seen again!  In hindsight, we could have logged all the property in 2017. Yes, the county would have slapped a seven year moratorium on our property, but we probably could have profited from the sale of the timber at that ...

WELCOME TO WELLCROFT BLOG We want to tell you the whole story of how we got started with our land in Washington state. It is an interesting story to us with many unexpected twists and turns, but you have our permission to jump to the parts you most want to learn about and skip the parts that don't interest you. . . just don't tell me what you skipped. First of all, I want to add a disclaimer to the blog from the start. Blogging is not my strong suit. If you view disjointed photos and text, chalk it up to this beginner. Hey, at least I'm trying! (Just consider that I will get to critique your blog too.)  How It All Started Believe it or not, it all started in New Mexico along about the summer of 2015. We looked at several properties near Glorieta. Some were very promising; one in particular had an amazing view of the Sangre de Cristo mountains from Santa Fe all the way to Las Vegas. But it was right by I-25 and the railroad, so the noise factor outweighed the view factor. Bu...