Welcome to Bufflehead Pond

Ever since I purchased 12 acres of wooded farmland in Kitsap County Washington I have struggled with what am I going to name the farm.  I toyed with Zelafarms, Zelawoods, Abildough Farms (a previous name I think as there is a carved wooden sign on the property with this name), and several others.  The farm was vacant when I bought it in April of 2009 with the exception of a family of Bufflehead Ducks that lived year round on the half-acre pond that is on the farm.

The Bufflehead Duck is characterized by the unique coloration of the male as shown above.  The white feathers on one-quarter of the head and the white wings, and the jade green face.  So, that is the background behind the name.  I'm going to use it for awhile and see how "sticky" it is.  All suggestions are welcome.

The real purpose of this BLOG is to track the progress of the construction of the new home we are building at Bufflehead Pond.  After a very protracted permitting, construction financing and contractor selection process we finally broke ground on the new house on Nov 12. 

This first posting will be rather long as I provide the background but I hope to make future updates frequent and short.  I figured this would be a good place to document the process with photos and some of the roadblocks we will inevitably run into.  You are encouraged to add comments and share your own rants about challenges you have had with construction projects.

Here is the actual pond.  Click on any photo to see a larger version.

And our actual residents

Getting back to the big picture here is the Google Earth shot of the whole property in the red outline.  The new home site has been changed to the south side of the pond.  The old house in the southwest corner of the property has since been demolished and removed from the property.

And here is our site plan.  On the site plan you can see the new location for the house. 

We did break ground on Monday Nov 12.  Here are photos of the foundation excavation.

And of course the day after the foundation was dug we had a deluge.  Most rain in a 24 hour period in 20 years.  Don't bother with any swimming pool jokes as I have heard them all at this point.  I've got to hand it to the contractor.  They got these forms built during the rain.  They came back after the site was dry and leveled all the forms and put in the rebar.

That's all for this first post.  Look for the subscribe button and you will get an e-mail every time I add new content.