On Monday we came close to clearing the last hurdle we face before getting our building permit. The final item on the checklist is a soil test for the septic system. Kirk, the man we hired to do the soil test, was finally able to get a backhoe onto our property to see just how deep the soil is over the bedrock. We had had a good bit of rain over the last day or so, so the ground was very wet. I wasn’t sure Kirk and the backhoe operator would want to get out onto the cleared area of the lot. They made it OK, although the backhoe slid around quite a bit during the digging. The operator had to push himself around with the bucket a few times.

Kirk, the backhoe operator, the backhoe, and a hole in the ground

Kirk and the backhoe operator admired our soil. They said it was beautiful. Kirk said the deep red color indicates that water is moving well through the soil, reaching all the little iron particles and rusting them thoroughly. That is apparently a good sign for the operation of a septic system.

According to Kirk, the soil is just deep enough to put in a conventional septic system leach field, although he said we will need to cover the leach field with a foot to sixteen inches of additional soil so the pipes won’t be too close to the surface. That’s good news, since the other possibility was an alternative system that would have been more complicated and more expensive.

The bad news is that I could hear the bucket on the backhoe banging on the rock even before I got to the lot. Once the backhoe operator reached the rock, he wasn’t going any deeper with his equipment, but we’re going to have to go through that rock to excavate the basement. It’s possible the rock can be broken up into small enough chunks to get them out without blasting, but we won’t know until we start digging.

We should get Kirk’s report Tuesday or Wednesday. Then we take it to the county health department for their approval. We then take the health department certificate, two sets of house plans, a site plan, a driveway permit, an officially-assigned street address, and a zoning verification form to the inspection department. After some period of time, we hope they will issue a building permit and we can begin the actual construction process.

There has been a lot of work on our new lot, but it’s hard to see the difference from the last time. Some large piles of dirt and roots have been hauled off. The rough outlines of the house and garage have been marked; the bulldozer operator (who works for neighbor John) put plastic drink cups on the stakes so he could see them more easily. You might be able to see them here.

It was quite cold Sunday morning when I took these pictures, so I gave the dogs a short walk down Lavender Trail, across Fouche Gap Road, and then up the other side of the gap. When you reach the end of the road, you can see our lot.

You can see the red dirt, the wheat straw that was scattered to hold some grass seed, and the light-colored gravel that neighbor John spread on what will become the drive. The tree we saved is right in front of the gravel.

From the lot, we’ll be able to keep track of what’s going up at the end of the road where I was standing.

There is a bit of extracurricular activity at the turnaround. It’s fairly secluded, so some innocuous and not so innocuous behaviors take place there.

The major development is the delivery of our house plans. This is a draft of the main floor plan.

The house will end up not oriented precisely with the compass points, mainly to take advantage of the view, but I think we’ll still get some decent solar gain in the winter. This is the drafter’s conversion of my self-drawn plan into a computer drawing. She told me that if we lived in the same county where she lives, my hand-drawn plans would have sufficed with the inspection department.

We lack two items for a building permit. One is a site plan, which should have already been supplied by the surveyor. It will show the lot and the location of the house with respect to the property lines, so we can demonstrate that we meet the setback requirement. The surveyor has done his work. He was supposed to have delivered the plan more than a week ago. I can’t understand why people will do work and then procrastinate and delay their own payment.

The second item is soil testing for the septic system. There are apparently few soil testers in this area, so I was pretty much dependent on one man. He was supposed to have contacted me several days ago, but has not done so. He seems to have plenty of work. I assume he will be more prompt when it comes to getting paid for his work.

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.

We drove up to Summerville Monday evening to meet the drafter who will draw up our house plans. My phone and my GPS both routed us the “back way”, which leads to the west of Texas Valley rather than up the major highway (US 27). The nice part of it was that we got a decent view of the west as the sun was setting. It was so dramatic that Leah insisted that I stop to take a picture. This is a panorama using three images I got with my phone. Click for a bigger view.

Unfortunately, the lower part of the sky ended up washed out. It might have been possible for me to get better exposures if I had tried a little harder, but we were running a few minutes late so I just stopped and grabbed the shots.

This made both of us regret not being able to see the western horizon, either at our current house or at our future house.

We made it up to Summerville and handed off my floor plan drawings to the drafter. She told us that if we lived in the county where she lives, my amateur drawings would be sufficient to get a building permit. Not here, though.

It will probably take about four weeks to get our drawings completed.