Re-marking the house

Here are Katie and Patrick in the (broken) excavator last weekend while we were waiting for the repair. What an amazing boy-toy for James (also an incredibly destructive piece of equipment). The rental company finally brought a replacement equipment for us yesterday.

See our last post, when Patrick and Becky staked out the boundaries of the house. When we all went back the following day (with a better compass), we realized that the hemlock tree that seemed to be in the middle of the garage was actually BEHIND the garage (although it still needed to get come down). The settings were actually only a few feet off... but we had a huge slash pile that was right over the front porch, which made it tough to mark the corners of the house (I wish I had a picture of Patrick teetering on top of a 15' slash pile trying to "move over 2 feet" to line up with the compass settings and mark the corner).

James and Becky met with our building consultant (Dan Rayburn, of U-Build-It franchise) yesterday to review the progress. His first comment about the site was something along the line of "you guys have a LOT of dense growth (biomass/trees/undergrowth - I forget the exact words he used)". He made some suggestions on where to pile the debris so it would be out of the way, in preparation for DIGGING THE FOUNDATION and starting the building process! Yippee!

Keep your fingers crossed that our Indian Summer holds for a little longer so we can do some digging before the hillside turns into a muddy mess.