After months of hard work, Sue has finally posted what will probably be the last of the pictures to the Web Log for my Mom’s house. Now, we can shift our focus toward building a house of our own. We should have started documenting this project a long time ago, since we’ve been actively involved in it for over two years now, but we’ve been occupied with so many other things, and Sue didn’t come up with the “web log” idea until we started building my Mom’s house. Luckily, I’ve taken lots of pictures along the way, so it won’t be hard to go back and bring things up to date. These events and photos aren’t in perfect chronological order, but you’ll get the idea…
Sue and I have shared the dream of building a home of our own for several years now. However, finding some land close enough to Columbus that we could afford, and buying it before we couldn’t afford it, was proving to be quite a challenge. Had we been looking for just an acre or two, it would have been pretty easy, but it’s always been my dream to have some room to roam, and an acre or two just wasn’t going to do it for me. Each year, prices were rising and we were still searching. Everything we could afford was too far away, and getting farther and farther away with each passing day. For a while, we became disillusioned and simply quit looking. One day though, while browsing eBay, I discovered the lot at Candlewood Lake, which eventually became my Mom’s new home site. Finding that lot seemed to renew our interest in the search. Sue spent some time browsing the Internet real estate listings again, and a short time later, came up with one that interested us. We went to look at it in August of 2003, and it didn’t take long for us to decide it was perfect.
The place we’re calling “the land” (until we can think of a suitable name), is located about 35 minutes North of Columbus. It consists of two different parcels that we bought about a year apart. The first parcel we bought consists of about 13 acres of woods and meadow, with a creek and a man-made two-acre pond. We’ve heard that a local businessman and his wife originally owned it. They built an earthen dam across a small tributary to the creek, creating the pond and a nice recreational area for their kids. There was even a beach at one point, but it’s long since washed away and grown over. They never had any sons, and their daughters weren’t too interested in hunting or fishing, so they eventually sold it, and it was bought and sold several more times after that. When we discovered it, it was tied up in a divorce proceeding, and had been neglected for a long time. We fell in love with it, bought it, and started the process of cleaning it up.
This is what we saw on our first visit. As you can see, there was a driveway, but it was in pretty rough shape, and the rest of the place was totally overgrown. You can’t even see the gate. Trust me … it’s there somewhere!
The areas along both sides of the driveway were just as overgrown, but luckily, the drive was basically sound. All it needed was some grass killer and grading to get it back into shape…
We got out of the car at this point to look around, and we heard water running. We investigated, and discovered the creek running along the left side of the driveway ….
We proceeded up the driveway, through a nicely wooded area with a steep embankment on the right side. Most of the trees are relatively young, but there are several large hickory and poplar trees throughout this area …
As we neared the end of the woods, we encountered a sizable hill. The driveway crested the hill and ended there. As you can see, it’s very sunny there. There’s an Ohio Edison power transmission line that crosses the property there, and they keep the right-of-way clear of trees …
As we crested the hill, we were greeted with this view. The strip of grass to the left of the pond is an earthen dam ……..
This is the view from across the pond, looking back toward the driveway. The trees surrounding the pond are mostly sycamores …
When we saw the pond, we were sold. This piece of land had pretty much everything we were looking for… running water, a pond, some woods, some meadow, and plenty of privacy. We discussed it for about ten minutes, called the agent, and made an offer. It wasn’t until a few days later, when I took a day off and went exploring, that I discovered just how nice this land really was. If you ever think about buying land, take my advice …. look at it in the winter, when you can see things better. The day we first looked at this land, the place was so overgrown, we didn’t even know the dam existed, and we certainly didn’t know what condition it was in. Luckily, for the most part, we were pleasantly surprised as we explored. The dam needs work, but it’s nothing we can’t handle. Things could have been a lot worse … we could have found a toxic waste dump. Here’s what it looks like from the air…..
You can see the pond clearly, but the actual boundaries of the property aren’t obvious. It took us quite a while to find them ourselves. Most of the woods you see are part of Mt.Gilead State Park, except for our part, and one other 50-acre parcel which is sandwiched between us and the park….
Shortly after we bought the land, we bought a tractor and a trailer to haul it on. There is a lot of grass to mow, and it came in handy for all the other projects we’ve done there….
I mowed the area along the drive to reveal the stream, which we later found out is called Sam’s Creek. I was surprised to see that it’s actually listed on the county maps. This photo was taken after a hard rain. The creek is not normally running over it’s banks like this, but we’ve seen it running even higher than this after a heavy rain. I figure we’ll see it up over the drive some day, but the drainage downstream is good and the water level never stays up for very long. We ran in to a bit of a snag when I went to mow this area though. I discovered that all the trees that had been cleared to make room for the driveway had been bulldozed into a pile along the creek, so we spent a couple weekends sawing up and burning a bunch of old logs and brush before we could clean this area up…….
We built a shed to house the tractor and all the other stuff we need there …..
And I built bridges over the creeks to make it easier to get around without getting wet. This is the bridge over Sam’s Creek ……
And this is a bridge over the creek that feeds into the pond from the north. This creek is smaller than Sam’s Creek, and it usually has very little water in it, except after a good rain, but there are a couple small springs feeding it, so it rarely dries up completely …..
One project we had to do right away involved repairs to the pond. About the time we discovered that the pond was formed by an earthen dam, we also discovered that the emergency spillway, which is designed to allow storm water to pass through the pond, had become obstructed by vegetation and debris. Storm water had been over washing the dam with each heavy rain, and the dam had been severely eroded in three places. Had we allowed that to continue for another year, I suspect the dam would have probably failed. Luckily, there are no buildings or property downstream, so a failure would probably not be catastrophic, but we certainly didn’t want to deal with something like that, so we took immediate action to save the dam. We still have a lot of work to do to restore the dam to its original condition, but we did clear the spillway so the storm water can get out of the pond without going over the body of the dam. In the first photo, you can see the buildup of vegetation and debris along the pond’s bank (front left), which was preventing the spillway from doing its job…
This photo shows us hard at work clearing the debris, and about six inches of topsoil from the spillway area, assuring that the water can never rise high enough to crest the dam……
Here’s the finished project, ready for grass seed. The grass grew quickly, and by the time the spring rains came, it was ready for action ……
Here it is the following spring, working as designed. When we finish the repairs on the dam, I plan to build a concrete headwall where the pond dumps into the spillway, and line the spillway with crushed limestone to prevent erosion. We still can’t believe all that water used to be going over the dam, and it didn’t fail ……
We used the dirt we removed from the spillway area, and some more dirt left over from my Mom’s house to start making repairs to the eroded sections of the dam. First of all though, all the vegetation had to be removed from the face of the dam. I spent the better part of the first winter clearing and burning trees and brush. It was only then that we became aware of just how bad the erosion was. In two places, the dam was only about five feet thick, and in one place, water was leaking through it. Amazing ……
We backfilled the really bad areas and compacted them, widening the dam to its original thickness as we worked our way back. We still have a long way to go, but as long as the spillway stays clear, the dam should hold. When we dig the foundation for our house, we’ll use that dirt to complete the job…..
Little by little, we’re restoring the dam to it’s original shape and size. In this photo, you can see an area of fresh dirt. That entire portion of the dam was missing. The dam was barely wide enough for our tractor to pass at this point. Now, it’s about three times that wide. Once we get the dam rebuilt along it’s length, we’ll shape and compact it better, top it with some topsoil, and get some ground cover growing on it ….
Meanwhile, on Christmas Eve day of 2003, I asked Sue to marry me (at the land of course) and we made plans to get married in the spring of 2004. Of course we had the perfect place for a wedding reception. Lots of friends and family came, and since we had the party on Memorial Day weekend, lots of people camped and the festivities lasted for most of the weekend ……
Since the wedding, we’ve made steady progress toward building our home there. We had originally planned to spend a few years paying off the loan, and then build our home when the time was right. However, as we spent more time there, we decided that the sooner we could build, the better, so we began looking for a suitable site for the house. About the time we had settled on a location, the owner of the 6 acres of woods directly to the north of our land asked us if we would be interested in buying it. Since the place we were planning to build our house was very close to the northernmost property line of the original parcel, we were very interested in buying the additional acreage. It didn’t take long to decide that we’d be foolish to pass it up, and eventually negotiated the purchase. Now we can rest assured that our back yard will always be woods, and we now have control over a significant part of the watershed that drains into our pond. Of course, spending more money on land has slowed down our building plans a bit, but we’re sure that as the area develops, we won’t regret it. The new land is almost entirely old growth woods, with huge trees of all varieties. It will make a fantastic back yard….
Some day soon, we should be ready to start digging ……
Filed under: Construction
