Neighbor John worked through the dry weather last week to expand the cleared area where the house will go, thus revealing more of what our view will be. Here is a panorama I shot before the rain started.

Click to enlarge

The extreme left of the image shows Little Texas Valley through the woods. The larger trees near the white loader will come down sometime. Some of the trees near the dump truck will also come down.

Leah says that you can’t really see the view, so here’s a crop showing the middle area where we have a view over town.

Of course things look different when you are using your own eyes.

The cleared area is larger than I originally expected. Part of the reason for that was that my estimated back property line is too far back. The surveyor’s line crosses the upper edge of the cleared area, so to maintain the required clearances as well as to site the house at the best place for the slope, we have to move our house down and to the south. So, it required  more clearing, and there will be more to come.

I would like to buy the lot that the view to the left in the panorama crosses, but John says that his brother is considering buying it. Based on what John said, the price would probably be low enough that we could swing it, but I don’t want to compete with John’s brother for the property. His brother might rethink things when he looks more carefully at what would be involved with building on that property. There really isn’t a good house site anywhere on it.

We’re going to have a lot more open area around this house than around our current house. That’s going to mean more grass to cut, although maybe it will also mean we’ll have room for some fruit trees.