Our 2 Year Homestead Progress Then Vs. Now Photos

hey folks it's maybe from Colorado Mountain living you know it's been a little while since we put out a video but Brian and I were actually out of town visiting family so we got a little break from the house but I thought I'd catch you guys up to date with something that's going on for us we wanted to do a little back then versus now a progress report on the house so showing you what the house situation looked like two years ago and showing and then contrasting the progress that we made today so we're gonna show you take you back in time and show you what this property looked like before we even started working on it we've got some old footage and some pictures that have never been shown before on our channel so hope you guys enjoy a little bit of then versus now before and after compare and contrast to how our whole homestead has taken shape over the platon past couple of years [Music] to roll back the clock to two years ago where our house stands now was just a big field and we had a little bit of disturbed dirt where Brian had started excavating with the tractor but essentially just wide open wide open meadow standing where the septic is now looking to the southwest you can see no house but definitely some big piles of dirt so just lots of hillside that's what we had to start with folks we did have our storage shed however it was in a different location it wasn't pushed back into the woods it was actually right here at the top of the driveway wasn't a really good place because it got blown apart while we weren't there because we were still living in North Carolina at the time our other first order of business was putting in the driveway so we had to do that by following the blot lines and digging our own driveway we ended up hiring someone to do it professionally but it was a very expensive project and as you know we're still not done working on our driveway we still have to dig deeper trenches on the either side and crown it a little bit so we can push the snow off more easily in the winter time as well as putting more gravel down all around so we have a better base our one of our very first videos we talked about how we saved money by doing along the work ourselves and when we invested in the tractor that allowed Brian to really do all of the digging for the foundation Brian did the excavating for the footings the whole house excavation was done by tractor and that saved us thousands of dollars but it was a lot of hand work a lot hard work to get that done by ourselves and it's amazing to think that less than two years ago this is what our house looked like we didn't even have a full basement we just had basement walls didn't even have a basement floor yet that kind of came later and then Brian worked on the radiant heat and that's was his big project all winter was getting this radiant heat ready so we could get the foundation pour because the foundation pour happened in February so really we didn't even have like the foundations of the house to work with until March but we couldn't even get started because Brian had to finish the septic putting in the septic field was another huge job that Brian did undertook himself but it's another job that saved us thousands of dollars but it was something that he just spent most of the winter doing and then we got our delivery of all of our Timbers the one fortunate thing in our favor was that winter was fairly mild we only had a couple of inches of snow at a time so it actually enabled Brian to get started on framing out the walls of the basement if we'd find cool things like a Monalisa tarp to checked the job while we were working on it and last spring we spent almost the entire month of May prepping the Timbers Brian was putting on all of the chamfers I was doing staining polyurethane inform oast six weeks before we even worked on framing up the house but it was just over a year ago when we raised our first wall and started to see the shape of the house take place with the timber assembly that job went up really fast three weeks later we had our final beam put into place and the roof on so it was really exciting to see a real speed-up of our progress and of course the house isn't the only thing we've made progress on we've also made progress on the homestead putting in the beehives putting in a garden experimenting with plants like strawberries it's just amazing to see a big difference over a year and how things have took off you know this is year three for the beehives beehives I should say and we actually got honey this year so it's really exciting to see the fruits of our labor come to pass and we continue to build towards our goals but let me just show you some of the modern pictures so you can compare and contrast looking at the different visuals of how our homestead has taken shape and changed the landscape over the last couple of years so let's start with that view from the bottom of the driveway right you're pulling in looking up the hill and surprised there's a house there and it's not completely a hundred percent tie back now when you look up close you see there's a bunch of new siding on there it's a nice dark rustic color pretty decent looking house with a nice view at the top of the hill so that's probably the biggest change to the landscape from anyone coming up the road now for us personally looking at the driveway the thing that's different for us is that there's a lot more wildflowers now over the last couple of years I've taken the time to plant a lot of web flower seeds that will manifest into really beautiful colors and wildflowers up and down the driveway throughout the summer these are nice some pretty orange California poppies and we have a nice blend of colors you know and then as you get towards the upper part of the driveway now you can see you know the house color popping out so you know there's a house right there now that's definitely one of the big changes for us is seeing that reddish stain it's definitely a big joy for us to pull up to the house and see this finished side with the siding done and just feel really accomplished about the work we've done this summer okay let's compare a couple more views so from the very edge of the driveway looking southwest there's the house and the side that's still in siding but you know nice big house there and then from the septic area looking out to the southwest there again is the house kind of affecting the landscape a little bit the ridge of trees and the mountains but there we are from the west side and if I turn around we got the septic behind me and behind that the leach field which has a whole bed of red clover now so zooming in you can see it's something that the bees really enjoy mostly the bumblebees actually haven't seen a whole lot of honeybees on those flowers but I'm glad that they're there the clover also seems to make a good salad bar for the elk in September in our last big piece of work of course it can't not talk about the beehives now we've got double the hives now maybe they'll be double again next year we'll see and then the garden I have got to work on some more but I've definitely taken my time to transplant a lot of mountain plants to get ready for our big landscaping project that's gonna come after we put in the retaining wall this year I didn't really put as much effort into growing vegetables as I did planting plants so next year I think I'll do a little bit more in the garden but this year was a little bit more house focused as well over the summer so that is a kind of wraps up the before and the after of the progress in our homestead well folks that I hope you enjoyed our trip down memory lane because I think we've really come a long way in two years it's hard to believe how far you come when you are actually in the middle of it until you look back even six months ago to see how much progress you've made with the home build so anyway it's just it's fun to see it it's hard to believe that it's only been two years since we started this whole thing but really it's been an incredible journey there's been lots ups and downs there's been a lot of hard work but we still got a long ways to go so I hope you guys stay with us we've got there's gonna be a really big transformation coming up next week you know behind me where there's all this tie back below the level of the deck this is all gonna be corrugated steel that we're gonna use the rusting technique to do our exciting on the lowest floor of the house so that's something that Brian ordered last week and that's going to be coming in this week so that's the project that we're gonna be getting started on and it's really gonna transform this bottom part of the house that faces the road that you see the most of when you're coming up the road so that's a big project coming up we're just about finished as high as we could go on this side with the siding before we order our boom lifts to reach the very peak there to do the cedar shakes so that's going to be something they'll be saved for the very end because we're also gonna be taking off the chimney that we had put into place when we were having the wood stove then we decided that we weren't going to use a wood stove on the inside of the house we went with the natural gas instead so we're gonna take that chimney down and that's gonna require the lift as well so we're saving those projects sort of towards the end where we can minimize the amount of days we need to rent the piece of equipment for but we're still we've got the we still have the vanity project going so I'm gonna get some stain getting all the pieces of wood stained and cut and ready for that not might be something we could work on this week as well so we'll see what we have time for so we just wanted to kind of go back a little bit in time and show you guys if you had you know you might have joined our channel later this year that we really did start a couple years ago and we were at the very bare-bones before we even had a foundation and that was just two years ago and this is all the progress that we've made you know working full-time jobs documenting our progress on YouTube trying to you know share with you guys the whole experience of what it's like to move to the mountains and build your own home so hope you guys really enjoy it and let us know what you think about our progress and we'll see you on the next one bye bye [Music]

Channel: Colorado Mountain Living

Views: 3,442

Rating: 4.9593906 out of 5

Keywords: homestead, mountain homestead, mountain home, mountain home build, colorado mountain home, timber frame build, colorado mountain, move to colorado, mountain life, building a mountain home, colorado homestead, homestead progress, house build progress, then vs now, 2 year homestead

Id: pdWuIPOi8p4

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 25 2019