Project Recaps - 2008

Mary's put together the full accounting of all the work we had done on the cabin this year. It's a pretty healthy bill; not quite as much as our first year and now most of the major stuff is stabilized. Of course, the main expense this year was the pool repair, which was done to our extreme satisfaction ,thanks to Uncle D in Luray - and the liner solution he installed for us probably saved us more than $5K overall this year.

At some point in the near future we'll have a full list of everything we took on, and reconcile the list of projects still to be done. Significantly, we have some work coming up on the driveway, as we have some wash from uphill that is creating an erosion problem, shown here on the driveway near the shed building.

In the second photo, there is one of the black tubes we've installed to direct the downspout flows into existing culverts in the yard; during the July and August rains there was an incredible amount of water moving, making its way down to Beaver Run.

Eventually we'll move to a rainwater collection system for part of this, but we haven't found the barrels we'd like at a reasonable cost yet - they all carry the fashionable "sustainable" or "green" design label, which seems to be an excuse to charge a lot extra for something that is very practical and shouldn't be a Smith and Hawken solution. Not to mention where the plastic ones are likely made, and the transportation/ fuel costs of getting them here, and all of that offsetting the sustainability benefits in the first place...not to be cynical or anything.

We are planning to address this problem with a culvert installation similar to the ones I have seen up in the Park, especially on Stonyman. We have some left over rail road ties that can be used for this purpose, and we'll cut the flow across the driveway into this culvert, so that the water doesn't flow the length of the hill taking our gravel with it....more to come on that, however!