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!