Yesterday, June 18, 2013

Yesterday, June 18, 2013 - - - - they started on the house. After all the delays the digging has started. 

                                              (Clicking on photos enlarges them.)
I met John today who drives the Komatsu and last week I met his brother Ron. I'm amazed at the job they're doing. Very impressive. 

A good thick layer of topsoil has been scraped away and saved to build up the soil level higher than it is currently. The house has to be raised higher than the septic tank field, which is about two feet higher than the original soil. That means more soil will have to be added around the house and graded or sloped to meet the existing, untouched soil. 

Under the topsoil there is a thick layer of clay in most places. You can see where some of it has collapsed above. That will be the basement. The house will have a small-ish basement ; the rest will be a crawlspace

There was an old electrical line wrapped around a tree and we always wondered if it was live and where it went. We suspected it was going to the pump in the well down on the shore - - and it is. Unfortunately it was severed during digging but they have spliced it back together and will 'fix' it permanently later; the pole barn still has well water. There is a new water line from the city which runs from M-25 to the edge of the property so the house will have city water. There is also a fireplug not far from where the house will be.

There's John near his Kamatsu. We know also now where the pipeline runs that brings water up from the well to the pole barn. It runs under where the house will be but it's deeper so it will remain untouched.

It looks like more of the trees, probably the birch trees and the big tooth aspen in the photo above, will have to be removed to accommodate the higher soil level when the house is built which bothers me not at all. The big tooth aspens are extremely brittle, break in storms and have short lives. There are also some birch bark trees that may have to come down but there will be many left near the bluff; they are also a short lived tree.

The yellow lady slippers are still flowering in the evergreen forest.

Some stumps have been pulled out of the ground to make room for the machines and the driveway; the man who was supposed to take the wood did not finish loading it and removing it. I hope that issue can be solved but at this point that's also NMP - not my problem.