Building in Texas

 
   After a quick trip through Colorado and Kansas to visit family, we headed south to Cleveland, Texas (a sleepy little country town about 45 miles northeast of Houston). Here we plan to spend the winter and build our new "Winter home" on an RV site at The Preserve of Texas. Way back in February of this year we made an announcement in this blog that we had purchased a site. Now we have come to build.

Our coach parked on the Platinum Model site back in March

     The first item of business is to finalize our development plans. We purchased what is referred to as a Platinum RV Homesite.  With that option you get a Casita, Spa, outdoor kitchen, and fire pit along with a pad and full RV hookups (50A electric, water, and sewer). Now you can take the base options or you can customize if you so desire. The folks at The Preserve have a design engineer on staff who works with you to design your amenities. We decided to make the Casita a little bigger and enhance the outdoor kitchen. After a few meetings and refinements to our designs, we arrived at a finished product. 

     The photo above shows our lot as of October 16, 2013. It extends well back into the treeline and ends up along Davis Bayou as it runs through the property. One of the first decisions we had to make was whether to remove the big Sweet Gum tree that is in the middle foreground of the photo above. It was positioned such that it was going to interfere with the back of our RV pad. We tried a variety of modifications but in the end, couldn't come up with a way to keep the tree. So, unfortunately, we had it removed. It is however, the only big tree that we needed to get rid of. The rest of the lot just needed some brush clearing and pruning. Mario and his crew came in and in the space of only a couple of hours cut down and removed the big tree and cleared a large area of brush from the lot.

Here the lot has been scraped and the Sweet Gum removed

Removing the brush

Nice view of the lot with tree gone and brush removed.
This was on 11-23-2013

     So above you see a progression. The Sweet Gum tree was removed and a company came in to grind down the remaining stump. Meanwhile, a bunch of the brush on the property was cleared out and removed. (Some by me, a lot by Mario and his crew) The front of the lot was scraped and leveled to a degree and prepared for the next step. It was determined that, due to the slope of the lot, that the back part of the pad would have to be built up by 6 feet in order to be level!!! That worked out to at least 100 dump truck loads of fill dirt. The dirt started arriving on December 4th and continues to today.

One of many truckloads being delivered

Our lot as of 12-6-2013

      The dirt comes in and is spread and will be compacted by a bulldozer in the near future. This will provide a solid foundation for the RV pad, Casita, Spa, and fire ring. Compare the lot photos from October to now. It is beginning to take shape!

Just for perspective... that's me on the left. The leveled dirt is about to my waist.

     In the meantime, we moved from the Silver model site to the Gold one. Gold sites have a nice shed built on them. This worked out well for us. The folks at The Preserve were kind enough to give us a key to the shed and we have been using it to store things that we have bought for the Casita/Spa. We have taken advantage of several pre holiday sales and of course, Black Friday. We are able to have them delivered to us here on site and can store them protected from the elements. The folks here have really gone out of their way to help us and make this transition time a little less stressful.

     So now you know what we've been up to for the last couple of months. The best place to see how this progresses is on our Facebook page. It's a lot more timely information usually with illustrations or pictures. Internet is limited to my MiFi card out here or sometimes I take the laptop into the Houston area on shopping forays. There I can get on any of a number of public WiFi spots. Guess what I'm saying is that the blog will continue to be more of a summary of happenings and Facebook will be more daily events.