We had a dream to move out of Southern California to paradise on seven acres in the Sierra foothills. Here is more about the process, choosing a builder for our mountain home, around which, my Sierra Foothill garden grows. What I wanted was a log cabin. Or any kind of cabin. A real mountain house. We had stayed…
This is a November 2001 entry from my recently found diary. The diary chronicles how we bought the property and our first five years before the house was ready. For how we got to this point, see Inspiration or the category ‘Our diary’ “Just after bidding on our new property near Yosemite, disaster struck! Daughter, Jolie, 19, had been struck…
There are a certain number of plants that I brought from our previous garden in Southern California. The zone is 10 or 11 there, or Sunset’s zone 24. Most anything can be grown that doesn’t need a cold winter. The list is in my Dave’sGarden journal under ‘Plants Brought from SoCal’ I brought many succulents…
Last year we had built a retaining wall and I couldn’t resist planting a few things like rosemary and lavender. We had no hose or water supply, so everything would get hand watered on our monthly(hopefully) visits to the property.
After buying property in October 2000, we started the building and site preparation process, by having the house pad graded and the ‘pond’ filled in. Next, were plans for our first ‘outbuilding’, an 8 x 16 shed. The house wouldn’t be begun until Feb 2004. From November 2002 Folks in this area build their garages, barns…
May 23-28, 2002 Memorial Day! Madeline had her prom (Derek’s senior prom) so we went up alone. Jolie was working at Claimjumper so she stayed home. It was to be a laying out weekend, 4 days of riding for Larry, so no big projects. Just relaxing for me. Friday, Larry and Russ went out riding,…
April 25-28 Wooden goat for the goat shed We snuck up here on the flimsy excuse that a bike race was taking place up the Central Camp road on a trail called 007. Larry used this trail for the dualsport rides. We left in the neon and brought a box of strawberries, birdseed, more peanuts and…
April 7-14, 2002 On the afternoon we arrived, the whole group came to our place for a barbecue. Larry had also invited lots of friends..we had a crowd. Project wise we did a lot of clearing of the small bushes between the trees. Larry tried out the new brush cutting blade for the trimmer. I…
This is a transcript of the diary I kept during the first years of our transition to the mountains. We had lived in Orange County, CA for the past 20 years and decided to check out property in Bass Lake, CA where we had vacationed for several years. Temporary ‘utilities’ Oct 12-16, 2001 This is the…
Russ called Larry to say there’s a fire on Rd 274, our road! Said he’d try to find out more. In the meantime Larry called Marcie and Paul, no one home. I called the Forest Service and they said it was between Thunder Way and Gentle Way!
This is a transcript of the diary I kept during the first years of our transition to the mountains. We had lived in Orange County, CA for the past 20 years and decided to check out property in Bass Lake, CA where we had vacationed for several years. No work on these two trips, just family…
On this trip our objective is to have the lot graded and have a couple loads of gravel, or mine tailings, spread over the driveway. After some juggling of schedules, Dick comes Saturday morning early and started leveling out the area where the circle drive was. We also planned to fill in the drainage pond area.
One idea was to match paint colors of our home to colors of the trees, plants and flowers right here on the land. Samples of the red manzanita twigs, Arctostaphylos viscida, the deep green of the bear clover, Chamaebatia foliolosa, and lots more were collected in an egg carton. Then a very fun day was spent…
We arrive with several objectives. I want to build a table of redwood somewhere, rake out the goat shed, attached the wooden goat I found on eBay and see a deer – on our land. Larry just wanted to be there and camp there with our trailer.
Our dreams are knocked out of our heads on November 10. Our daughter, Jolie has been struck by a car which badly broke both legs. We are plunged into emergency mode.
This area around Oakhurst has everything we need and we had such a good feeling about it, …enough so that when we started looking for property, it was easily found. In fact, Larry, without even seeing one place declared, “Put an offer in on it!”,… which is ultimately what we did.
