Building Permit!

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.

Clearing the Land

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.

Intro to House Building Blog

page 1

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.

[editor's note: these blog posts about the house building were transferred from our original homepages in 2011. many of the original posts have exact dates. where exact dates were not available we have made every attempt to be as accurate as possible. or just approximate.]