Chapter 328: Individual Responsibilities for Preparing Our Hilltop Home

January 1 to mid-March, 2007

Once the Army pulled out, everything fell onto our shoulders. Not Vanessa's, because her shoulders were already fully loaded, but the rest of us felt the shift of responsibility. We'd known it was coming of course, but when the Army left, EVERYTHING stopped unless we made it move, and that felt quite different.

Mom had been frantic for months. Setting up a home at the "stinking rich" end of the market was something Mom had never been exposed to before, so she was starting from square one. There were a million things for her to learn and do. For example, Vanessa and Mom had gotten excessively worked up when they'd bought a dinner service for our current home. There was far more stress in that decision this time. I'm not sure why there was so much more, but there was.

Mom showed all the signs of buckling under the pressure - such as developing a frantic air and short temper - but I thought she was actually enjoying herself, although I was never brave enough to risk saying that out loud. The reason I thought so was because of how Julia acted. I suggested to Julia that the obvious thing for us to do for the Kids' House was to take all the best things out of our existing home, "The dinner service, for example."

Julia made it impolitely clear that my idea was a long way south of "no good", and that she and Carol would be picking out a new dinner service for us. Soon after that, Julia - who had appointed herself in charge of the entire Kids' House - also started showing signs of buckling under the pressure. Every female except Donna was stressing over issues which had easy solutions sitting at Peoria Road, such as a perfectly good dinner service which would go to waste if everyone bought new services. To me the answer still seemed obvious, although not as obvious as keeping my mouth shut. I had to believe the females enjoyed themselves, because there was no other reason for them to put themselves through it.

Dad had seen the writing on the wall and was taking a long vacation from his work. Dad's area of responsibility was outside the house (he had the wrong genes for inside), so he'd had to hire the Head of Security, maintenance guys, various contractors, etc. Dad had never hired a Head of Security before, so he had some serious learning to do too. Being the Head of Security for a family that controls tens of billions of dollars is NOT a small job. [Dad had started on the security issue just before the second settlement was reached in late September. We'd decided we were going to move and would need our own security staff. Several of them were hired late last year, such as the two female guards that accompanied the girls to Paris. In our inexperience we'd made small messes out of this and several other issues, but they were coming right as we learned enough to correct our mistakes or we hired people who knew what to do.]

Prof managed to miss most of the work simply because there wasn't enough outside work for two husbands. Apparently there were a million things for the females to decide on inside the houses, but only a few hundred for Dad outside. Prof acted as a sounding board for everyone else and was a source of good advice on how to plan and manage things. He may not have known much about the specific "things" that were being done, but he knew how to be systematic about them.

Mom observed, "Ava, when you first approached us you said you wanted to learn how to set up a household. You're in charge of setting up the Staff and Visitors' Quarters."

"Eek!"

"You've got several girlfriends who I'm sure would love to help you. Probably only men will live in the Staff Quarters so you can be much more relaxed about the quality of that. Plus you can hire whomever you want to help you. Don't hand over responsibility though."

Ava was regretting her decision to be unemployed, and therefore employable by Mom. No doubt spending money on furnishings would revive her spirits.

The main part of the Staff Quarters had twenty four small bedrooms built into an underground level to minimize the visual impact of the house and for sound insulation purposes, as we expected about 75% of the occupants would be Security who'd be operating three shifts so would need quiet rooms to sleep in. The top floor, which was at ground level, had a big living room, games room, kitchen, laundry, gym/dojo, etc.

It wouldn't be fancy living; not even average living really. The bedrooms were designed to fit a three-quarter-sized bed and a small set of drawers. They had a small closet and not much room for anything else. They were too small for two people to live in one room. A woman could visit and stay overnight with her boyfriend if she wished, but it'd take an unusually tolerant woman to live with him for long, not to mention having to put up with all the other male housemates, especially as there was just the one very large communal bathroom (the female guards lived off-site nearby).

Attached to the far end of the Staff Quarters, on the end farthest from our gate, was a reduced-size mirror image of what I've described above. A mini-Staff Quarters, if you like. It was for the senior staff; mostly our Head of Security and Head Gardener. It had its own kitchen, living room, etc., and four large, double bedrooms with their own bathrooms. Our senior staff could easily be married and wouldn't want to live with a couple dozen young men; and neither would the men want their bosses living with them. There was a connecting door between the two independent buildings, but we imagined that it'd be infrequently used.

What the Staff Quarters lacked in amenities, they made up for in being free. Most of our staff would be males from 20- to 30-years so they'd save a lot of money if they chose to live onsite rather than rent externally. The main conditions on their living in the Quarters were that the inhabitants were responsible for their own cooking, laundry, consumables, etc.; and in the event of an emergency, everyone was to respond appropriately, such as gardeners hiding from armed intruders, but helping with a fire.

Carol was given responsibility for the live-in staff quarters inside the Main House (under the Activity Level). The parents had no intention of employing anyone to work in the Main House yet - if it happened, it'd be after I moved away - but the rooms still had to be furnished. Carol's job at Peoria Road had just been bedrooms, but the staff areas under the Activity Level were complete apartments so she had a great deal more to think about. However, that job wasn't as urgent as any other job, so Julia and Ava didn't hesitate to rope Carol into helping them. Carol very soon had heaps to do, and was roping her friends in to help her. All the females were having a great time (not that I'd say that out loud).

Donna was automatically in charge of the horses. That was something she was already involved in as she'd participated in the design and construction of the stables. She was quite serious about it, even learning how to cold-shoe horses herself. I winced the first time I saw her hammering nails into Patch's feet, but he didn't seem to care, and he ought to know. Patch was a placid horse, but Penelope was a handful and gave Donna quite a lot of trouble by refusing to stand still with one foot lifted so Donna could shoe it. Donna lost her temper a few times, which was a very unwise thing for Penelope to cause when Donna had a hammer in her hand. Donna persisted through the anger and tears Penelope caused her, and eventually trained Penelope into cooperating. We all admired Donna's dedication.

As you can tell, the parents were taking the 'educational' approach to setting up our new home, for themselves as well as us kids. We were doing nearly all of the decision-making ourselves, rather than passing that off to experts. We wouldn't be doing much of the actual work, but we'd still be taking responsibility for it.

Unsurprisingly, landscaping was made my responsibility. That would've surprised me greatly a couple of years ago, but it'd been the way things had turned out recently.

The family already had ideas for the areas around the Main House, some of the downslope looking toward town, the area between the "V" of the Visitors' Quarters, and down around the front entrance; but none of their ideas were set in concrete - apart from what was already set in concrete, as a few paths had already been laid. They were few and mainly near the front gate or northwest from the Main House and then down the ridge to Donna's Plateau. If I wanted to, I could have them ripped up if they interfered with my landscaping plans, so I had 280 acres of virtually clean slate to play with.

My only other personal design experience - rather than following Vanessa's visions - had been the 0.01 acre I'd originally intended to be a small Japanese water garden, which had somehow changed into a five times larger Mountain Forest-themed garden, so I wasn't exactly well prepared. Fortunately, even though landscaping might be my responsibility, I'd be making damned sure the families agreed with me - or more likely for most of it, just didn't object to my ideas.

My waiting until after the Engineers had decamped before listing the allocation of responsibilities wasn't meant to give the impression that that was when the responsibilities were handed out. They were usually assigned even before construction had started, so we'd all had a couple of months to get ready.

In my case, that included hiring gardening staff. Once the major gardening work was complete, maybe in three years or so, we'd need far fewer gardeners to maintain it, but I was starting with about twenty staff because they had a LOT of work to do now. Most of them would be laborers whose job would last only a year or two, but they'd know that going in. The senior hires were very good gardeners of course, with the Head Gardener being an out-of-towner who'd come to work for us from having worked in other large, private gardens before. He knew what needed doing, and didn't hesitate to tell me.

An essential part of my preparation was obtaining the equipment twenty gardeners would need. It was a HUGE pile of gear: wheelbarrows, rakes, shovels, wood-chippers, and a hundred other small items. Not to mention vehicles! I bought a large flatbed truck and rented a second one for the first couple of months of work, three tractors with a wide assortment of attachments, and several electric quad-bikes with wider wheelbases than normal as our property had some steep slopes and quads roll too easily, plus a dozen trailers for carting tools, soil, refuse, and other stuff around, including horse poop. The senior gardeners were delighted that we'd have several horses. The garden laborers might've had a different opinion though.

The Head Gardener wanted a large nursery established IMMEDIATELY, starting thirty seconds after I'd hired him, to prepare plants for later transplanting elsewhere on the property. He even told me off for not hiring him twelve months before construction started so he could get things set up properly. That we hadn't owned the property until two months before construction started was apparently not an acceptable excuse. I should have known that years have four seasons and have planned accordingly.

The nursery was built on the western side of the property, near Donna's Plateau (or as Penelope clearly thought of it, "Penelope's Plateau"). The nursery needed a substantial water supply, including for sprinkler systems, different types of buildings (environmentally controlled greenhouses down to simple shelters to keep most of the wind and frost off), large bins for soil, compost, fertilizers; multiple storage sheds, etc.

You get the idea: just setting up to have a big garden was a MAJOR operation! Then there was actually doing the gardening.

A great deal of landscape planning needed to be done. With 280 acres and several buildings, there were many different landscape projects. I've already mentioned a few of the jobs (the Japanese garden between the "V" of the Visitors' Quarters, for example), so I won't bother going through them again. I'll describe a couple of new ones though.

Vanessa likes pretty flowers. Personally that's not my style, but that's irrelevant. With 280 acres, there's ample room for everybody to have anything they wanted, and I wouldn't have dreamed of saying no to Vanessa even if we only had a quarter of an acre. The front of the Main House, and especially down the eastern leg of the "m" (around the surface path down to the Office), was to be "pretty". When she has time, Vanessa will get out there and putter around in the garden herself. She was the HEAD Gardener, so she could do whatever she wanted. If he was smart, the Head Gardener would be a lot more circumspect talking with Vanessa than he was with me.

Then there was the biggest landscaping job by far, both in terms of area and work. It was much more to my liking than "pretty flowers". When we'd first drawn lines on a map to indicate how much land we wanted, we'd extended our boundary west to include a large forested area we thought we'd clear for the horses, correctly suspecting we'd have more than two as Donna had long since signaled her desire for more. Soon after getting ownership of our new hilltop property we'd decided to keep the horses on the middle plateau, leaving all the forested area without a purpose. After further discussion we'd decided to make the west-most hundred acres of our property into a 'perfect' native forest with the best flora and fauna we could arrange, using the definition of "flora and fauna" that mean "a natural area of plant/animal-life". The area was mostly covered in trees already, but what we had in mind required a GREAT deal more than just leaving it alone.

One thing Corvallis has an abundance of is people who're experts in exactly what we wanted to establish. I printed out some digital pictures I'd taken of the area and a Google Earth top-down picture of it, and drew a border around the area we had in mind: the entire lower plateau and the northern half of the slope up to and including Donna's Plateau. It'd be a rectangle 2,700 feet north-south, 2,200 feet east-west, but with the southeast quarter removed for the horses; making a total of just over hundred acres. The horses' current area would be pushed southeast six hundred feet, but clearing some bush and trees to make more grass for them was easy. Some of the nursery would have to be moved too, but that would be easy (for me I mean, as I'd just have to tell other people to do it. It's great having staff).

I typed up a description of our plan then took it to OSU to show to the guy Prof had made an appointment for me to see. In a very short time I was having to fight off the enthusiastic and very useful advice that started flying my way.

We wanted an interesting and diverse environment, so the lowest parts of the land (475 feet above sea level) would be planted with flora to look appropriate for that altitude and somewhat lower; the highest parts of the land (an exposed 725 feet ASL) we wanted planted appropriately and as if somewhat higher. In other words, we'd be stretching the vegetation species range. That meant there'd be huge amount of extraction and replacement required, because the land was currently covered in all sorts of vegetation that didn't fit that scheme.

The land had two small watercourses in it already, rainfall permitting, but we'd sculpt the land further to get even more benefit out of the rain that fell in the catchment area, and to create a good-sized pond in the middle for wildlife (or as I thought of it, a great place for swimming with naked pretty girls, so I could have a wild life). We'd also create some narrow walking paths. They'd look like game trails because we wanted this area to be very natural. We'd create small caves and other helpful 'homes' for when we reintroduced more fauna.

One of the reasons our OSU-based helpers were so enthusiastic was because the entire area would be walled around the exterior, with an internal fence to its east, to keep non-flying predators out of it. We'd have a lot of control over the area, including controlling public access, so we could make and maintain a very good environment.

We weren't going to make the area freely available to the public, as it was part of our property after all, but it would be made available to OSU's scientists and enthusiastic nature photographers (very enthusiastic, if they saw naked girls cavorting in the pond). We'd be creating photographic hides as part of our landscaping. For example, the back of the artificial caves would have one-way glass installed and a crawlway in from the other side of the mound for a photographer to get his gear in and out. With facilities like that, den life could be studied.