We had a surveyor mark our back property line on Friday. He’s going to provide us with a site plan as well. That’s part of the county inspection department’s requirements for a building permit. Even aside from the necessity, we needed the line marked so we would know how far back we can place the house.

I met him at the lot after he finished the survey. It had been dry for a couple of days but the cleared area was still very muddy.

I had tried to mark the line myself, since the interior corner was marked and I knew the compass heading that the back line took. Unfortunately, my line was 10 or 15 feet further back than the actual line. That means we have to push the house a little further downslope than we had been thinking. It’s not much, but every foot further upslope gives us that much better opportunity for a view.

Today (Monday) we’re driving up to Summerville, about a half hour north of us, to meet the woman who’s going to draw our house plans. She has a full-time job and does drafting on the side, so we have to meet around 6:30 PM after her normal work hours. The Wendy’s on the north side of Summerville seemed a good place since we both know where it is; that means we’ll be having dinner at Wendy’s. We’ll probably take the dogs so they can help us finish the French fries.

She has estimated that it will take a couple of weeks to finish the plans. That gives us time to get a soil test for the septic system and, as I mentioned earlier, an actual street address.

We’ve had one piece of unsettling news – our new next-door neighbors are running short of water. Their well is around 100 feet deeper than ours and only about 75 feet away. We had to replace a failed well pump, but we have had no problems, even during the dry weather we experienced over the last few years. It’s still disconcerting to learn about it.

They just moved in a few weeks ago, so it’s more disconcerting for them than to us.

Neighbor John has cleared a large area around where our new house will go, from almost the back property line to a little beyond where the front of the house will sit. He has uprooted and hauled away around 10 dump-truck loads of tree debris and has scraped the whole area clean.

I last saw the lot on Friday; so much had changed that it was hard to get my bearings. The tree I selected a few weeks ago as the central point was gone. In preparation for the clearing I had put in some stakes away from where I expected the clearing to take place. There were two sets of stakes. I set them so that each set defined a line, and if you put yourself at the point where the lines intersected, you would be at the left rear corner of our future house. When I stood there on Friday, nothing looked familiar.

John worked late on Saturday. When I went to the lot on Sunday, it looked so different from Friday that it was hard to get my bearings again. This is a panorama taken from near the rear of the cleared area, looking first to the north into Little Texas Valley through the trees. You can actually see into the valley better than it looks from this photo. The radio tower in the center of the photo is on Lavender Mountain at the other end of Lavender Trail. Rome is behind the trees just to the left of the truck. Although it’s not visible in the photo, there is a view of the western part of town roughly where the truck cab is. I think some judicious tree cutting will give us a pretty good view of town. Unfortunately the view into Texas Valley will disappear when the trees leaf out. That part of the view is through trees on someone else’s property, so we can’t cut any of them to improve the view. Click to embiggen.

There is a lot of clearing left to do. The driveway will take a different path from the current drive, so there will be clearing to the right of the photo. The area for the septic system leach field will be cleared, which should open up the view towards town.

I have found someone to turn our house drawings into plans that the inspection department should accept. John remembered the number of a surveyor who can mark our back property line and provide a site plan, which is one of the requirements for a building permit. The next step is to find someone to do the soil testing required for the septic system; that’s another requirement for the permit.

There is one more important call to make. We have to get a street address.

On Tuesday we hit our first problem with construction of the new house. Rather, neighbor John hit it with his bulldozer. It’s a spring at the entrance of the new driveway.

Tuesday was the first reasonably dry day in more than two weeks, so in the afternoon John  began clearing again. Some time later he called (but I missed the call) to have me come down and look at how deep his dozer had sunk into the mud. Leah told me about the call, so I went down the street to see what was going on. John had moved the dozer, and there was a fairly strong spring emerging from a depression that it had made when it sank into the mushy area.

This is John driving and his helper directing. The spring is about where the pine branch is hanging down towards the drive, right across from John’s helper. John has already moved some mud to let the spring flow down to the right of the drive. The area above the spring is not too wet for work, but the driveway entrance is critical for the work to continue

I had noticed that the driveway entrance looked muddier than further up the drive. I thought it might just be surface runoff, but obviously it wasn’t.

It’s a problem, but the whole construction process is really just a series of problems that have to be solved. John is calling in someone with a backhoe to make a ditch upstream of the driveway to divert the spring into an existing ditch and then into a culvert.

He’s going to bring in some rock to make a solid surface at the driveway entrance. That will be good, because this video should give some indication of just how muddy it was.

The long process of constructing our new home began Monday. We didn’t start construction. We didn’t even actually break ground. What we did, or what the first contractor did, was begin clearing the driveway and the immediate area around the house site.

I hired our new neighbor, John, who just moved into his new house at the bottom of Wildlife Trail. He runs an earth-moving company, so he seemed a good bet for this first work.

Here his bulldozer sits at the entrance to the driveway, before any work was done. His employee ran the dozer and John ran a skid-steer loader to pick up the brush and debris and load it into his dump truck.

The trees along the path of the drive were no trouble for the dozer. Here he goes up the drive.

Here I’m looking back down the drive from roughly where the house will be. You can see the green ribbon I wrapped around the odd tree we are trying to save.

A few weeks ago when I was measuring and marking the lot, trying to find the best location for the house, I wound a candy stripe of bright tape around a tree that is in the rough center of the property. The tree came up pretty quickly.

I watched most of this work from a safe distance. Sometimes both machines were hidden by trees and brush, but I could occasionally see the top of medium-sized pine tree shaking and then dropping towards the ground. It looked like a scene from a King Kong movie, where the only sign of Kong thrashing through the forest is tree tops shaking and being pushed down.

It’s easy to take for granted the power that machines give us. These two machines and their operators did work in a couple of hours that would have taken a crew with chainsaws and shovels a week. I had a skid-steer loader when I was working on our present house. I always told people that running the loader was like taking a vacation compared to pure manual labor.

It was midafternoon when the work started. It was cloudy and a little dark from the start, and then it started raining. It’s supposed to rain for Tuesday and Wednesday, so I doubt that much more work will be done until after Christmas. The dozer and loader were both having problems with traction on Monday. After the rain we’re supposed to get, the red dirt they uncovered today is going to make work even harder.