This is the story of Cooper's Folly.  Specifically how we're doing in the creation of it.   So here goes with my first post.

Five years ago we bought this gorgeous plot of land in an old "Viking" town called Poulsbo. Poulsbo is a ferry ride from downtown Seattle waterfront and a twenty minute ride from there.
Poulsbo has an amazing grocery store and our lot is only ten minutes away.  So I'll be ok for shopping!
It has the best array of fruits and veggies that I have ever seen in one place and that does include fancy stores like Whole Foods!  (For those of you in the UK think Harrods!)

Here are two photos of the lot as we first saw it.  All nicely mown, green and shady.

The lot has a big old cedar tree towards the front of it, which we will have to cut down! (TIMBuuuuuuuR!)

Currently the only entrance to the lot is through that little lane you see on the right hand side of this photo. We'll be making a new entrance to the property just about where I was standing to take this photo.

That little "Shed" was probably meant for a water tank originally.  Paul is going to pull it down and build a new one!

At this point I'd like to post a drawing of the floor plan but -- shucks-- it will be so small you won't see any details!

Oh and there is the other small point that it's a funny file format .. oh well!  I'll get the techno-genius to work on that.

Since we sold the house two, or is it three weeks ago, we've found a house to live in for a year that is close to the building site and gone through the rigmarole of getting approved to live in it.  We pick up the keys to the house on Thursday  August 1st, and trundle off to check the power points and just how much we can get into it.  Our first load, (the composters!) will be going with us in the back of Paul's truck.  

The current house is 3200 square feet with 3 garage spots.  The temporary house is 1900 square feet with two garage spaces. ULP - will we fit is the big question?

Since then we've pestered the life out of the bakery at Costco and brought home close to 100 boxes, and the wine store for  boxes for our bottles and glasses.  Most of our bottles are flavored syrups --we don't actually drink that much!

Today we went and saw our builder, and gave him a BIG hunk of money to get him going.  

So currently a nice man/architect is drawing up our official plans.

Another dude came out to the site this week and dug some of it up to see how it "percs."  

• I haven't stopped to think about what that means but I bet it's short for percolates.   As the lot is not attached to main sewer system, I get to connect my toilets to a private one of my own, commonly known as a septic tank which is going to be hiding on the lot somewhere.  These are de rigeur around here- everybody has one and I'm no longer scared of it.  
• These dudes will now go off and make drawings of our lot and where they want to put said tank in relationship to the house.  (As you can guess there are LOTS of regulations about that.!)  Those jolly drawings, the architects pictures, engineering specs and a whole BUNCH of money get handed over the local planning types in the process of requesting PERMISSION to build the house we've been scheming over for five long years!

My next task is to talk to a bunch of dudes who dig wells.  I HAVE a well but it has to be tested again. 

• it's been five years; pay the nice man to do that again!

In the meantime we pack, pack and pack some more.  The process is complicated by the fact that we're not just packing to move-- oh no!  We have to pack two ways, long term and survival gear, food, clothes etc for about a year. The rest will stay in boxes for a year to emerge all pale and sickly after that time.  How well can we get through this without breaking the crystal and vases? Only time will tell!

More after we visit the new house!

Here we are again and about time!  I had planned to keep this up to date and then -- after the last post on July 30th, my life went NUTS..........

Oh sigh, talk about the most exhausting way to spend six weeks of your life?  And at my age six weeks is a significant portion of what's left!

Ok-- on with the story... and frankly portions of it read like a nightmare novel--but I'll get to that later.

So we packed and we packed; we took everything soft like pillows and cushions and even vacuum sealed them knowing that space was at a premium.

On August 10th we rented a truck and packed it to the doors just with the materials in the garage and drove it to the rented house.   Then we unpacked that truck load into the mercifully large garage.

With no time for a sense of accomplishment we rushed through another week with me getting up at o'dark 30 every day and packing yet more.  

Now there are two schools of thought when packing to move--- pack everything and sort it out later or-- as I had to do, sort it while packing.  So let's say I'm packing cleaning supplies--they're everywhere... in the bathrooms, (3 of those), in the kitchen and backups in the garage.  I did miles a day sorting things out and labeling boxes. Several miles of sticky tape were consumed. And as the days rolled on and my kitchen was still FULL I panicked.

August 17th and yet another truck load goes off to Poulsbo and the yellow house. I can't even find that photo!  But at this point we looked at the garage and said, hmmm, we have a washer/dryer/freezer, fridge and sofas etc to go in here yet and another 70 boxes. Will it all fit?

A word about how we got this all to Poulsbo-- an aside.... and definitely more 'interestink' to the friends who live in the UK.. England is about the same size as Washington state and you can drive the length of it in a long day... they don't need or do ferries because they don't need to. They have the chunnel!  But we're surrounded by islands and water here and are pretty happy about the Washington state ferry system.   Here comes one right now!

And here we are in our jolly rented truck waiting for it.... 

Now you might think that the boat in the above picture won't hold very much.. but in actual fact the ferries are gihugeic and take big removal vans and over 200 vehicles.  To give you some idea just HOW big they are, here we are on our way back inside the belly of the beast. This is just a photo of the vehicles in the main belly of the boat, we are close to the front, the sides are also loaded with cars too on two floors!

So that was load 3... 

And then we looked at our wardrobes and said-- oh *$()(&%!

How are we going to get all of our clothes over there?  Full and frank confession. I had offloaded a ton of stuff to the local thrift store but I still had two wardrobes full of clothes. One of my girlfriends in England, (aka little sister) tells me that I am not good at downsizing, (you know you're right!) But I tried really hard now that I had to move it all.

We gathered up huge handfuls of hangers and covered them with clean refuse bags (the ones that we bought for yard waste??) and then threw them all load by load into the back of Paul's pickup. Then we lashed it all down, got into our vehicles and - they day before we moved officially,  we hauled ass (ahem) for five hours round the peninsula, me with my special flower arrangements on the seats of my car and Paul looking like a huge bright blue wardrobe turtle.  This time we drove so that we wouldn't have the summer ferry wait-in line. My car was left officially at the new house.  We ate standing up I think when we got back too tired to think! We kept packing until bedtime.  I think... I can't remember, by this time my brain was a mess of scotch tape and cardboard fiber.

The big moving day arrives and we've finally got everything in the kitchen packed up, thanks mostly to Paul. I emptied the contents of my fridges into a huge cooler and the brilliant dudes who moved us said not to unpack my freezer. WOO HOO~!

But they came with one truck-- sigh-- we knew it wasn't going to be big enough. So

they packed that and went off to get another one. We packed that too.  In 85 degrees. Get the picture?

We left the house at around 3:30 and drove around.. big traffic jams... It was such a relief to see both trucks driving up to the yellow house.   They carried every box at our direction to the right room or the garage... thank goodness we labelled everything.   We piled the garage to the doors and ceilings. But we got it all in --- just!

 

                                                                                     

They didn't leave until they had assembled our beds -- they even put the bed skirts on the beds!  Is that amazing or what?.  If you look into the dictionary for exhausted you will see our photo in a hot melty mess falling into beds. I couldn't sleep my feet hurt so much!  Now is that a silly reason for not sleeping or what?

A day or so later we rolled back up to the Renton house, vacuumed it from top to bottom, took another load to the dump, and said goodbye to it for ever.  I had expected to feel emotional about it after 28 years but didn't.  I just wanted to be moving forward with the new house and the remains of our lives.

So here we are.... our house on our backs doing what we call 'sophisticated camping" in the little yellow house.

And every day we say, "have you seen the phone charger, what happened the to wine thingy?  I can't find........  And so it goes.

Next comes applying for permission to build.

By the way, the lot doesn't look so Idyllic any more; a tree has fallen and the weeds are waist high... but we'll soon see to that!

Here is Paul tramping around through the brambles with a spade looking to dig up a bucket o' dirt.  Explanations forthcoming! As are the nightmare tales of the bureaucrats at the county planning department!

Hugs and squeezes and thanks for reading.

love Moi...