Busy weekend on Brown Hill Road — we bought a new toy/tool last weekend and Darren attempted to drive it up our driveway on Friday. No luck. So he tried again on Saturday with 3 tons of rock in the back, and it made it! That is going to make our driveway project so much easier!!!

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He also found a patch of mushrooms, right in our front “yard”! He brought 21 home, and we found 3 more later that afternoon. We’d found 2 the weekend before, and are hoping there will be more. It is so exciting to see a patch like that — and it was right out in the open, not in the woods or on a hillside or anything. I’ve heard that dirt that gets disturbed will usually have mushrooms the following year — something about the spores being disturbed. That area was disturbed the year before, but I’m not complaining!

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Then on Sunday we spent the day taking down small trees at the top of the first hill so we can widen and work on the slope on our driveway. We’ll soon be renting another mini-excavator to tackle that job again. This is the project we are hoping to get a lot of use out of the new truck.

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We spent 2 days on Brown Hill Road this past weekend, cutting down a few more trees and burning what we could. The stump of the big hickory we took down last fall during the driveway project is still being burned away — it’s almost gone, though! The grove of sassafras trees came down, all except the funky sassafras that I like. I do wish we could keep it, but it’s right in front of where the garage will be and neither of us want to drive around it. Besides, it’s mostly dead — but we’re going to leave it and enjoy it while we can. At first I hated taking down trees, but now that I can finally see the house site more clearly, it’s easier to see what needs to come down, and what we can choose to keep.

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My favorite part of the land we bought on Brown Hill Road is the forest canopy. We have made the grassy area at the road beautiful and park-like and we love sitting there and waving to our neighbors and listening to the creek running in the spring. We even like the clearing in the back because it is so quiet but still just as beautiful. But stepping into the trees and you feel completely different. In the summer, the canopy keeps the sun from heating everything up and it’s so much cooler. Even in the winter it feels different in the woods! But I knew the day would come when we’d have to break the canopy as we cleared a spot for the house. I’m not at all sad about it — we will still be surrounded by trees and we will get plenty of shade. And it’s been very fun figuring out where the house will go and what trees must come down in order to get the views and security we want. Security, as in, not worried about if that tree will fall on our house! There is so much more to do, but watching this house site get cleared has been one of my favorite parts of owning this land so far!

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So far we’ve taken down approximately 35 trees on the top of our hill on Brown Hill Road. You’d think that would have made a bigger dent in the canopy, but so far, most are just spindly sassafras trees. We also moved the wood pile so we can get to the trees that we’d been stacking that wood against. There was a lot more wood stacked up or waiting to be split and stacked — it took bribing my 18 year old to come help us for us to get it all moved. Boy are we all sore today too!

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After last week’s snowfall, it warmed up a bit this week and most of it melted away. We headed out to Brown Hill Road to try to lay out the house a second time. We gave Version #4 of the house plans our seal of approval and are now waiting for final drawings so we can start talking to builders. But we also have measurements and layouts to play with, and lot of sticks and orange marking tape we can use! I wish I had better pictures to show you! Then we took a couple of hours and took down some trees that we know must come down. In looking at the house site now, we have a much better idea of what needs to come down so we can really get focused on that.

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Here’s what a foot or more of snow looks like on our property!!!

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Hello, 2021! It’s been awhile since I uploaded anything from Brown Hill Road — 2020 took a lot from us. We lost some loved ones, we lost some time here on the property, but we’ve not lost our desire to move out here! We’re slowly getting back to the point where we have time to spend out here — now if only the weather would cooperate!

We did install a couple of trail cams, though, just to watch the activity on the property. We hadn’t seen much being disturbed while we’ve not been around, but you just never know if someone is going to show up. Plus, we get to see the animal activity too! I’m uploading a couple of shots from the cameras — deer are plentiful, and apparently we have more coyotes than we realized! I also got a shot of the icicles hanging off the rock ledges across the road. So beautiful! And the creek is running again. I really do wish it was one that ran year-round because it is so pretty.

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I’m on vacation this week and puttering around at home but decided to take today to visit the property and do some stump and rock collecting. After working so hard on the driveway a couple of weeks ago, there is a lot of cleanup that needs to be done! I spent the day picking up some stumps that the excavator dug up, then picked up rocks along the driveway to haul down to the new path. The large stones that could work for steps were left there, and then I took the rest down to the creeks. Left half of them along the drainage creek we put along the driveway, and dumped the rest in the seasonal creek near the camper. Not a bad day out on Brown Hill Road!

Darren took a few days off to rent that excavator again and work on the driveway. He hauled dirt from the sides of the upper portion of the driveway down to the hill at the bottom, and had gravel delivered to coat it all again. We managed to take 2° of slope out of the first hill, but we don’t know if that’s enough. It’s still steep! A 4WD vehicle can make it up easily, but a 2WD struggles. Hopefully after the gravel settles in it’ll be easier. Anyway, here are some pics of his week out there:

While we had the machine out there, we also spent a couple of hours working on continuing the foot path across the driveway and up the hill to the house site. The bank on the other side across from where we finished the first section was at least 3′ high, so having that machine dig into that bank helped tremendously! We were able to place 5 or 6 stone steps and now are ready to continue the work by hand. We also finished setting the last 3 stones on the first section, at driveway level. Here are some shots of what we accomplished:

Lastly, one thing we definitely wanted to get done with the machine on the property was to move the huge stone we’d dug out of our driveway last May down to the bottom of the hill. We kicked around a few ideas of what to do with this huge stone, and finally settled on wanting to stand it up to be an address rock. It had a flat side that we could set into the ground and it balanced nicely. We are hoping to find someone that can come out and carve our address into the side, perhaps our name too. Should look great! Here are some pics:

With so much of the land and house site ready, the logical next step is planning the house. So we gathered up all our ideas, pictures, sketches and hopes and dreams, and dropped them into the lap of someone who knows a lot more about designing a house than we do! He visited our site, heard our thoughts, then sat with us as we handed him picture after picture, showing him stuff we liked, and explaining what we don’t like. This is so exciting! And so terrifying!

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