Well, it’s been another four months and now we’ve spent the night in our bed in the ADU. I specify this because we spent the night on the property back in July, but it was in a tent with no electricity or running water. But now the county has signed off on all the permits and inspections and the ADU is officially livable1. On Monday we hired a U-Haul and a couple of movers and got the bed and other big items of furniture moved, and we spent the night in the woods on top of the mountain. Yay! So now we get to be thoughtful about what else gets moved, and in what order.
The British housing makeover show, Grand Designs, has several repeating themes, many of which we find baffling. One which comes up in nearly every episode is the owner talking about some location within the house as being ideal for sitting in with a cup of coffee. One gets the impression that “a cup of coffee” is British code for some kind of snuggle toy and not a caffeine and happiness delivery pod. Nonetheless, since folks do ask us for pictures, here are some views from the ADU this morning:
Of course, now that ADU construction is complete2, construction on the main house can go ahead. As noted before, the ground here is essentially a couple of feet of soil on top of Really Hard Granite™. For each of these pier holes there is a corresponding cylinder of granite that has been cut out and stacked up to one side of the site.
Some time soon a bunch of concrete trucks will show up and pour a lot of concrete, and then there’ll be a foundation.
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The county wants the ADU to have its own address, “so that emergency services can find it”. They also won’t tell us how long it’s going to take for the address assigner to fire up Excel and update the row for our permitted structure. There are several ways to be critical, cynical, or just mean about this, but instead I’ll just be happy that we’re living in the woods, even if it’s not entirely official. ↩
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Except for the fence, so for now the dogs still have to be on a string and closely supervised when they go outside. ↩
The Quintana-Beitzel Coprosperity Sphere 