The Goal: build a mountain cabin in West Virginia, do-it-yourself style.
The Schedule: none.
This is an update on our project to build a cabin in West Virginia. To get you up to speed, check out my recent post, Gonna Build a Cabin in WV. That means stop reading this and go to the link.
Great, welcome back and thanks for not bugging me about all the typos. You now know we've got 20 mountain acres with a gravel road, a camper and a chainsaw. These things do not make a cabin. Not yet. Our grand plan of building a cabin is to do it ourselves at our leisure. And to serve this goal of doing it on our own time we require some level of comfort. Unfortunately, a camper and chainsaw do not equal comfort. We need water, sewer and electricity. The details of these are not clear: Water well or cistern? Where do we locate the septic system so we can use it now with the camper and later with the cabin? As for electricity, do we tie into the grid or go off-grid? These are all important questions but instead of answering these I bought a Bobcat skid steer.
Seriously.
It was necessary.
100% necessary.
We have 20 acres of rugged terrain. We need to move rocks, take down trees, dig holes and stuff. My experience with renting excavating equipment has been great. I think Rentals Unlimited provided great equipment at a fair price, however, you can't beat the convenience of having a piece of equipment available 24/7 and with many businesses cutting back there is a surplus of used heavy equipment. So, we took the plunge. We bought a 2003, Bobcat 763 with 368 hours on it. Bobcat says their engines are good for 6000 hours. I don't know why you buy heavy equipment with hours and cars with miles but I did the math and if you drive a car 100,000 miles at 40 mph you wasted 2500 hours of your life sitting behind the wheel. For comparison, my Bobcat is good for about 250,000 miles and it's only gone 15,000 miles. Pretty damn good buy if I may say so.
Getting the Bobcat to our land was a bit of a problem. My 2007 Ford Ranger is rated at 5500 pounds towing and the bobcat is a hefty 5300 pounds. You can't pull a Bobcat without the 2000 pound trailer so my Ranger was about 2000 pounds weak. Thankfully we have friends who have the most badass A-Team van on the planet – a Ford E350 that can tug a whopping 8800 pounds. Joel and Jenni were nice enough to drag our Bobcat all the way to WV. We decided to make a weekend out of it and packed grill-food and beers. I'm really glad we had the grill-food and the beers because about 30 minutes after getting the Bobcat out there I promptly got it stuck against a tree. No worries, we spent a cold, snowy, March evening drinking beers and cooking on an open fire.
Next up. Getting the Bobcat unstuck.
Off the grid? Dude!!!! Do you want to sabotage your wife's career? On the grid, demanding more power! The more the need, the more there is to regulate!
Posted by: mark from nrc | 06 April 2011 at 12:27 PM
Very funny!
Posted by: mhf | 06 April 2011 at 12:33 PM