We've been staking out

We've spent much of this week, except for the two coldest days and the afternoon of the fire, staking out the house site.



The strings mark the outside walls and the view is looking west, from inside the boundary of the living room. There is a window planned in the short wall in the foreground to allow a view of the stream below the spring. The diagonal string that runs the full width of the picture is our north-south reference line running downhill that was established by aligning the shadows of two thin sticks at solar noon a few days ago. By the way, solar noon on that day was just seconds before 1 PM EST. Next week, after Daylight Savings Time begins, it will be about 2 PM EDT.

The large fallen tree has probably been there for 10 years and will be removed to a garden area before excavation begins on the site.



This picture looks uphill from just south of the south-east corner of the house where the kitchen will be. The hill is not as steep here and the bedroom at the back sits where there is a depression through which water runs when it rains. You can tell where the damp places are by the very light brown dry grass there.

We've got to get some advice on whether we can safely route that water around the north-east corner before it continues down the hill. We'd like to have a small retaining pond behind the bedroom which would contain the flow from most rain events.

We ran out of yellow string so we used "CAUTION" tape for the back wall of the bedroom. It's much easier to see in the picture, but not as accurate as string.

If this location is OK for the house we will lose two large trees because the excavation will be too close to them to expect them to survive the amount of root loss. The top of the house will be about 2 feet above the current grade at the north-west corner and about 6 feet above grade at the north-east corner of the master bedroom. I hope we will excavate enough soil to berm the entire north side of the building.

The rest of the story

Here's the picture I said I needed to take before explaining how the fire started.



It's actually funny, after the fact.

My neighbor, and still friend, was trying to burn this pile of sticks and brush. Notice, though the fire seems to have burned right under the fire pile, the brush hasn't even been scorched. Amazing.

Our property begins in the background, just this side of the the four cedar trees. Look carefully and you can see the barn in the distance, just over the black ridge.