Teresa says some people might find these updates boring.  I figure at least I get to organize my thoughts... and anyone interested in building process / property development might benefit as well.  It takes a while to develop land from dirt to livable.  Anyhow, here is our current status:

Floor plan:  We have a pretty darn solid floor plan at this point.  We have expanded things by a foot or two in the kitchen and master bedroom, allowing for a garden tub in the master bath.  I have attached it to this entry.  It is up to revision #16, but at this point, we are dealing with details.  Still subject to change, of course.

Energy consulting:  We've talked with a few energy experts/ consultants about our design and house orientation.  We went ahead and purchased Energy-10 and plan on attempting the in-depth analysis ourselves.  We'll have to see how it goes.  Maybe it is a service Tanda Enterprises, LLC can offer?  We'll see.

Water: We have a well!  Yep, at 15 gal/min, we're pretty thrilled.  We shouldn't ever run into water problems with that kind of flow.  A well is a huge unknown when developing land, a kind of roulette game with Mother Nature.  You never know how far they will have to drill (they charge by the foot) and how much water you'll get.  Some drill 900 feet or more for a dry well.  Ouch.

Trenching:  We've decided to go with one trench for both the 5.5 ft deep water line as well as the well pump electric line.  The power company and the telephone company would like to rip their own lines in, so that's what we'll let them do.  We've got to get that water line in first.  We're not thrilled about killing more trees, but we don't have much choice here... the machines need an approximately 8 ft wide swath through our woods, and with the price of materials, we can't follow our windy driveway.  The good news is, the other guys (telephone and power) should be able to use the cleared area for their lines.

Builders:  We've basically selected our builder.  We haven't decided quite yet whether to attempt to GC a hunk of the project or not.  At a minimum, we plan on doing a bunch of the interior finishing work ourselves, stuff we feel we can handle.

Driveway:  There's good news and bad news.  The good news is that sun is directly hitting our clay-laden switchback now, so it dries out very quickly.  The bad news?  It has been wet and rainy out here.  When we went to go check out the well drillers at work on Tuesday, it started pouring... rain and hail!  So, it *will* eventually happen, but we'll probably need 3-6 days of nice, warm, clear weather before we can bring a gravel truck to fill in that muddy area.  However, spring is the rainy season.

Septic/Gray Water: We still are doing some research on our toilet/gray water systems.  I've found two manufactured low-flush composting toilet systems (Envirolet and Sun-Mar).  We are still doing research into the legality of gray water in Colorado.  It appears it isn't really allowed, but we may try to plumb for it anyways in hopes that the law changes some day.  In an area of water issues, it doesn't make sense to not utilize what we can.

Building:  Still planning on building a detached garage and finishing it before winter.  We've started putting out the plan for bids.  Teresa and I might insulate it ourselves with fiberglass so we could use it during the winter.  In addition, we are still planning on having our home foundation poured before winter.

So that's about it for now. Stay tuned for more updates.