If curb appeal is everything, our little cottage had nothing. A nice collection of ancient trees gave the place a mystical appeal, but they denied us a driveway. There seemed to be enough room, if we could only recapture some of that land from the forest. What we didn’t realize was that taking down 12 trees would be the easy part.
Before:
The cottage sits in a holler; a term used in our area for a small rising valley region between two hills or mountain often containing a creek. We’ve lived in a holler with a creek before. Moving water can wreak havoc on your landscape.
Starting at the top of a large hill behind the cottage, the water ran along the left side of the property. From there it found its way under the street to a creek that runs through a park in the middle of Stuart Circle. Over the decades the water had carved out a wide ditch along its route that left little room for a proper driveway.
An excavator worked for several weeks to take back the land from the moving water. He added a corrugated drain pipe from the top of the hill to the street with collection drains at the top and bottom. Then he moved the earth around to fill in the ditch and take the steepness out of the drive, and still he hauled away tons of dirt.
Hundreds of rocks uncovered in the process now form a retaining wall.
With that job finished we now realize there’s room for a driveway and a garage with a guest suite. The first land grab went quite well.
Meanwhile, my focus had turned to a parcel of land behind the cottage. At the top of an ivy-laden hill is a small sliver of land that sits below another road up above. I wanted this sliver of land to be part of our back yard, but it wasn’t. My worry was that some day a house would go up on this land and ruin everything.
The long sliver of land was hardly wide enough to build a house given the required set-backs, but it wasn’t impossible. What it lacks in width is made up for in length. It stretches behind our property and past our neighbor’s house as well.
We found the road above our cottage where we also discovered a For Sale sign attached to that sliver of land. We called Julie, our trusted realtor, and made a ridiculously low offer – a move my husband called a defensive purchase. Julie made our case to the owner, they accepted our meager offer, and our final land grab is complete.
Now we can dig into the mountainside to have even more room for the garage – and I admit that my imagination runs away with me over what else we can do with all this extra space. The only caveat is that my husband has made me promise, for real, that this will be our last move ever. Thank goodness there seems to be enough projects left on this little cottage to last me a lifetime.
The Secret Garden Cottage, Still In-Progress
The Fartlek 