New House - Progress Being Made

Last week, we met with our builder and signed the contract to build the new house (eek!).  While we're really excited about it, we're both really scared, too, since there just so much to do in a short period of time.  The good news is...the builder thinks it will take about 4-5 months to build, so we're looking to move in sometime between September and October.  Our rental is month-to-month and the landlord is our builder's dad....so if we need to stay for 6 months, its not a problem.

A fair amount of my posts going forward for the next 6 months will probably be house related.  I don't have a ton of time to sew (in fact my sewing machine hasn't been touched in over 3 weeks at this point), so I don't really have much to post about in that regard.  I will have a "crafty" picture at the end of this post though.

The next few pictures are just some snap shots taken from approximately the same location on the lot.  Its really odd to see the transformation so far.

The picture above is when we first bought the land in July 2010.  Just about in the middle of the picture, there's a really light spot where the sun is hitting and there's a rock there.  In the future pictures, you'll be able to see that rock pretty much all the time, so you'll be able to see what sort of changes went on.  This first picture shows the land pretty much untouched with the exception of a small backhoe getting in there to dig a test-pit for the soil test.

This picture was from only a week later.  The rock in the foreground...that's the same rock from the previous picture.  We had taken the first week of July off in 2010 (with outrageously hot weather) and spent the mornings chopping down trees and moving brush.  In just a week we made a ton of progress.

This one was from the middle of August 2010.  I don't have a wide-angle picture of the lot, but you can see how much more open it is even at this point.  From July to August, the only people clearing the lot were my husband, me and his dad.  So with only three people, we made a ton of progress in just 5-6 weeks.

This one is from sometime in late October or early November.  I'm pretty sure it was from October.  Again, about 1/3 of the way up the picture, you can see the rock from the first pictures.  At that stage, we had cleared pretty much everything we wanted to for the area our the house.  We dropped a few more trees in the back to make the back yard a little bigger, but that's about it.  Its pretty different from the first picture!

There wasn't too much to see at winter-time...except lots of snow, so this picture is from April 24th.  Things are really starting to get green there now, but in April they were still pretty brown.  Some of the trees had buds on them, but with the grey skies it was hard to see.  If you look on the right side of the picture near the big tree, there's the rock!  :-)  The big wood chip pile is all our brush chipped up for us.  The driveway will angle to the left (on the very left hand side of the picture) and the house will be basically straight ahead.

Our builder now has his construction sign up on the lot, and we're supposed to break ground this week!  Here's hoping that everything is good!