Honeymoon Bay House: Wellhouse means water. Water means baths.

The goal: running water by Christmas and an indoor space with heat and light.

The dream: Our Google SketchUp model is carefully drawn, including furniture and paint colors. In the imaginary world, we have a cozy, functional space.

-- The downstairs has the water pressure tanks, an electrical panel, hot water, laundry, and a giant claw-foot tub.

-- Outside, there is a covered work area with lights and an outdoor shower - great for butchering chickens, washing the dog, milking the goats...

-- Upstairs is a tiny bedroom. 8' x 12'. We are calling this the "mother-in-law" as we were designing it thinking about Dawn coming for Christmas and how unappealing sleeping in the tent in the snow sounds. (Don't worry! Dawn will have a warm place to sleep for Christmas, one way or another!) Also, a tiny porch up stairs - born from my desire to turn the well-house into a tree-house type play fort.

The progress: The trucks have come to drill the well in September before the ground became too wet to drive on. The trucks came three days to drill the well 300 feet. The trucks have come to install the pump. The water flowed.

Drill and tender trucks in position, drilling for water.

On Wednesday, November 23rd, the day before Thanksgiving, some kind and generous friends showed up to push wheelbarrows of concrete up hill in the mud to get our pad poured for the well house before the weather turned to freezing at night. We have the greatest friends! On short notice too! Dad and I then kept returning to smooth the concrete little by little until midnight.

The crew waiting for concrete: Tim, Jordan, Mike, Sean, Ariel, Joy-Mom

Boardwalk through the mud. Not wide enough for most of the wheelbarrows, but a nice idea and a little better to walk on.

Dad and Ariel putting the finishing touches on framing the pad.

Tim dumping the first load (of many) of concrete into our form.

The plan: I've been busy measuring stud lengths, buying wood, cutting studs, organizing the wood, and making a detailed plan. Hopefully this will be the weekend walls go up! So far I have cut 34 boards to length, which is all of the brown colored in boards in the diagrams below. We also have all the downstairs windows though we still need a door. Today my goal is to cut the rest of the wood and sort it into four piles for the four walls. Tomorrow and the rest of the weekend we will get our best construction friends to come join us and get buys with the nail gun assembling our home-made well-house kit. I have high hopes that on Monday or Tuesday I will be going to the store for joists for the ceiling/next floor and a big stack of plywood.

Meanwhile, it's snowing here and school is canceled for the day. Time to bundle up and get to work!