Building Fiascos, part 1

This will be the first in a series of funny and not so funny stories about the frustrations of building a home in a rural area outside a very small town, while you are still 300+ miles away.

Flash back to early 2008. Retirement was looming in the not-too-distant future, the building site soil testing had been done, the house plans had been reviewed and mostly finalized, and we were ready to have the builder break ground. My husband and I had 10 years to discuss where we wanted the house placed on our 20 acres. We came to an agreement, and carefully measured from an easily identified tree, set up a rock cairn, put a flag in the cairn, and took pictures. I then took a close up google map of our land, put in the property lines, circled the tree, and drew a line to the “X” marks-the-spot where the cairn was located. I then emailed a pdf copy of the map and the picture of the cairn to the contractor and the draftman. The draftsman replied that he received the email and understood our instructions.

Flash forward almost two months. They still hadn’t started the house. We were camping on our land in the motorhome, and went to our future neighbors’ house for dinner. We walked to their house, but he drove us back after dinner because it was dark and chilly. Right before we got out of his car, he asked “so where is your house going to be?” We gave him a 30 second, but fairly detailed, description and said goodbye. The next morning we headed back to the city.

Two days later I remembered to turn on my cell phone, which had been off for our trip. When living in the city we had landlines, and our cell phones were just for emergencies. As soon as it turned on, there was a message from our neighbor, saying that they had staked out the house and that it was in the WRONG spot. In fact, it was staked out in what I think is one of the prettiest parts of our land, a small rise with some junipers, lots of interesting rocks and cactus. I refer to it as our rock garden. What a loss that would have been if they had started excavating!! Numerous emergency phone calls to the contractor, the person who staked out the property, and our draftman (who couldn’t figure out how they had gotten it so wrong!) finally resolved the problem – but not the third time it was staked. And it was actually still wrong - in the correct east/west location, but 8’ further to the south then we had marked (corner of porch, vs corner of house, which has worked out fine). After 3 tries we figured we had better go with “close” rather than “exact.”

In hind sight this incident is pretty funny, as a near miss, but at the time it was very tense. We should have known that this event was a harbinger of other problems yet to come.

The next installment will be posted sometime in the future.