Let there be ... dirt?

by Ed Rozmiarek

We made our weekly visit to our lot this afternoon hoping to see some exciting progress. Our builder had mentioned that the site prep was done and ready for us to examine. We were thinking that we would get out to the lot and find some wood framing up the foundation. However, we got there and the only thing we saw was dirt, several large mounds of dirt. That, and a big hole. Where once was a bare lot and foot tall Texas field grass, there is now a construction site, port-a-potty included.

Some day soon, there will a house on this bare piece of dirt.

The view from the top of a pile of dirt. Look! We have our own construction site port-a-potty!

The thing that struck me was that the cleared area for the house looks so small. I know it’s the right size for the house and that we are building a pretty good sized house, but it seemed small. I know from watching many houses being built in our current subdivision that the bare foundation will seem small, but it’s still a little scary when it’s your own house. I spent some time stepping off the area and it’s the right size, but boy did it seem small.

We spent the rest of the site visit just walking around the lot talking about fencing and other odds and ends. Shea spent the time climbing on the mounds of dirt and doing what little boys do and Kevin re-explored his future backyard, trying to climb the trees and whacking ant hills with a big stick. After getting home today, Susan and I were curious about the relative sizes of the lots for our current and future homes. After looking up the size of our current suburban lot we compared that to our lot for the new country house. Our new lot is 25 times the size of our current lot. It’s hard to imagine that we could fit an entire block of our current neighborhood on our new lot.

Shea plays on one of the piles of dirt scraped from the building site.

The building site and the "trash corral" for construction trash.

The week had started out with a Monday morning meeting in the rain with the electric company. We needed to plan out where the power for the house was going to come on to the lot. This was another thing I thought the builder would handle, but it apparently is something the owner needs to decide. After talking to the engineers from the power company, we decided not to decide. Or rather, we decided we could wait until after the house is positioned and framed to determine the final position of the poles and from which side of the lot the power will enter the house as there are possible feeds from either side.

Looking forward, the weather forecast for the next week is pretty good, a little cool but no rain, so hopefully the foundation will get going this week and we’ll see some real construction, not destruction, during the next week.

Posted by Ed Rozmiarek at December 11, 2004 8:47 PM