Saturday, July 23, 2011

Art in the forest


This spring the children in the local school and local artists created an outdoor exhibition in the forest near our village. We took a walk on my birthday to go and admire some of the work.


A view of the village from above in the vineyards.

In the forest we came across a whole flock of felted geese. These were the project that Chiara's class had worked on. They will stay in the forest until November. We will have to go back in a couple of months to see how they have weathered all of the rain.



The Foundation

Well, actually the plot looked like the photo below when Mr. Aerni was finished. All ready for the foundation to be added. We won't have a cellar, the water level in the area is too high and it was way out of our budget.

Laying the foundation.

All ready for the house to be delivered.....
King of the mountain!

The next step, clearing the plot.



In March it was finally time to break ground on our piece of land. I was in states visiting with family, so it was left to Diego and the kids to make their mark. Diego took a shovel intending to let the kids each dig a bit. However, when they arrived, Mr. Aerni, in charge of our earth moving, had other plans. He asked Diego what he planned do with "that thing" (the shovel) and then invited the kids to each have a go in the digger. It was a hit and Devin added "Baumeister" (builder) to his list of future jobs.


Devin at work!

Finley gets a turn.

Girl power!
Yeah, for a job well started!
After the kids had had their turns Mr. Aerni got to work and soon the plot looked like this....



Saturday, April 16, 2011

Christmas Day in April - Still catching up!


Between September and December not a lot happened with the house. We waited impatiently for our building permit and visited the production factory in Germany to pick out all of the bits and pieces that would be part of the house.

Over Christmas we had a great snow storm. Christmas day we decided to have a walk up the hill. It was a great chance to see our plot from above and of course to enjoy the sun and snow. After a good walk up, the kids zoomed down on their sleds.








From above we could look down on our plot and see that in the winter we won't be getting a lot of sun. Oh well, a good reason to get out of the house and up the hill to where the sun is, right? The arrow shows our plot.



Catching up

Ok, it has taken a bit of time to get this post off the ground. We waited such a long time for the building permit to come through and then, boom, everything started happening pretty quickly. I have a back-log of photos, so bear with me while I get things up to speed around here.

In Switzerland, before a building permit is granted you have to put up a "profile" of the proposed building. This is so the neighbors can get an idea of what is going up around them and have the chance to put in any objections. The photos below show the profile of our proposed house (taken September 2010). Luckily for us no one objected!


With a view of the vineyards in the background.

Standing on the other side with a view of the hill.

Our village is pretty rural and the piece of land that we are building on is surrounded by empty plots. Well, almost empty. Our most direct neighbors can be seen below.

Nice Brown Swiss cows.

So, now I am off to edit the rest of the photos from the last seven months, because believe it or not, the house is now standing and you won't believe how fast it went up!



Sunday, January 2, 2011

A New Year, a new Blog! Welcome 2011!


After at least 5 years of lurking around reading other people's blogs, I've finally decided to start my own. I hope to keep family and friends posted on the development of the building of our new home on "New Street".



This is is our plot of land in July 2010. At that time it was full of wheat. Right now it's full of snow, but that is a photo for another post! Yeah to blogging!