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.