We're out of the ground!

There is an expression in construction, when the foundation is done and the wood starts going in, they say you are "out of the ground". It looks like we are finally there.'
Here is the first piece of wood going on to the foundation. The first shipment of wood was the wrong size, it needed to be 3" wood, and the hardware store didn't have enough so the framers only did a few of the beams the first day they were working.

Previous postings showed a huge concrete monolith rising out of the hillside; since then we have filled in the dirt around the foundation, finished the waterproofing on the concrete, and installed the French drains. All we can see now is the finished work. The dirt that Patrick and Katie are standing on in these photos used to be 12 feet up in the air. Katie is standing on what will be our front porch looking east, and Patrick is at the NW corner of the front porch.

We also had some excavating work done; we now have a navigable driveway up to the front of the house (which is quite useful when we want to have wood delivered etc). What used to be a 90 degree turn onto a 16% slope (not generally navigable by most truckes) has now been smoothed into a gentler curve. The electric company made it up last week to turn on the power. (So now we not only have a Portapotty, we have electricity!) Things are starting to move along!