A week ago today, while we were on our way home from Denver, neighbor John began the excavation for our new house. He texted us a video of a backhoe bucket scraping the rock that underlies the entire cleared area. It was not encouraging. But then he included a picture of the excavation they finally managed. He said we got lucky – no blasting required.

This is what I found Tuesday when I went to look at the site.

That big pile is topsoil and broken-up, sandy rock. Some will be used to fill around the foundation walls. We hope to save all the topsoil for use around the site. I think it will be good planting soil

Later, John and his helper were removing topsoil from the garage area.

This is back of the excavation, where the back of the basement will be with the top at about the level of the main floor.

The dark red is topsoil. Everything else is rock. The topsoil can be removed easily, but the rest is more trouble, especially with the dozer John and his helper are using.

As you can see, the rocks are layered fairly uniformly. It surprised me that they uncovered no large boulders like the ones I found everywhere in the area I had excavated for our current house. Everything at the new lot seems to have broken up into sand and small rocks.

Today the entire basement area is excavated. The garage grading behind the house is mostly done, but there is more rock that has to be broken up before it can be removed. John plans to have a large backhoe brought in on Wednesday to finish that part of the excavation.

Once all grading is done, the next step will be pouring footings and foundation walls. I hope that happens within a couple of weeks, but with construction, it’s hard to know for sure.