It has been a long winter thinking about the Maine property and all the things that can be done up there. Get the road in to as close to the cabin as we can get, get a contractor in to see if the cabin is salvageable and, if so, getting the work started. As I have told my wife Trudy, this camp has been worth the cost to buy it if only for the wonderful distractions of thinking what could be done to make it a beautiful, more usable and fun property.
But the first order of business is getting the road in as close to the cabin as possible. To recap, when I purchased the property, the only access was to use the neighbor’s driveway, park on his property and row a rowboat over to the peninsula that the cabin is on. The dream was to get a road put in from Democrat Ridge Road that runs through our property to the cabin. That would make it much easier to get to the cabin, get supplies to the cabin and to get contractors to the cabin to do work. They started the road last fall but wet and cold weather forced them to stop. The plan was to start on the road again this spring.
So, good news/bad news. The good news is they have started cleaning up the road they had built last fall. It needed to be graded and built up with gravel, some side ditches put is for drainage, etc. Essentially all the work has been re-establishing and improving a road the timber company cut when the property was timbered in 2013. The bad news is they have blown through the road budget and they have made zero progress in getting closer to the cabin. I don’t blame them for this. They ran into some unexpected issues with the finishing of the progress so far. As far as getting the road closer to the cabin, it is still too wet from the persistent heavy rains this spring to make progress in some of the lower lying areas of the property. Hopefully things will start to dry out a little bit as we head into summer.
The gravel they are using to finish the road is coming from a bank gravel deposit on the property. That saves some time and money since we don’t have to buy and truck in loads of gravel. The groomed portion of the road looks great. You can see in the second photo that there are still some muddy areas. I wouldn’t want to go through that with my 2 wheel drive pickup.
That’s it for now. Hopefully I’ll have an update sooner than later.