Breaking Ground

The little flags are the locations of buried utilities like power, cable and telephone.  We're only scratching the surface here so there's no danger of hitting a wire.  After scraping away the grass we create a 10 by 25ft area aovered with coarse gravel to clean mud from tires as vehicles leave the site (Vehicle Tracking Pad).

Grass and topsoil are removed to be used later.

The footings must be below frost line or they may heave, damaging the foundation walls.  The North side of the house has a walk-out basement, so footings must be installed in trenches 30" below grade.

Here's the final footing trench.

On April 17 at 10:08 Mountain Time we broke ground!  With the exception of getting a Certificate of Occupancy, this is probably the most significant event in building a house.

Site Work Begins

I set a reference string, then measured everything from that.

Once the lines are in place, I marked the ground to guide the excavator.

Because the lines will be destroyed as they are doug, offset stakes need to be placed to provide guidance after the excavation.

I started laying out the outline of the house on the site today (April 25).

Fabrication Begins

The log portion of the house is being fabricated in Canada.  Here are some progress pictures.  The logs are being cut and fitted at the mill site,, then dissassembled and trucked to our site.

The Move

More loading - it took a crew of four 5 hours.

Everything stgacked up, San Gabrial Mountains in the distance.

On Tuesday, April 16th everything got loaded into a truck that then got transferred into an 18 wheeler.  Delivery will be any time from 3 to 14 days (makes it difficult to plan).

Delivery came on April 23, everything is ok (we think), sorry, no pictures of the load-in, it's so easy to get distracted when everything's happening at once.