The House - Week 0

Most dear readers of this blog probably already know that we're building a house.  Construction started October 27, so we're currently in the 10th week of construction.  I'm getting a late start, but I wanted to document the weekly progress of the house.  Many of these pictures have already been posted on Instagram (follow our home construction progress by following house.of.squire), but I wanted somewhere to post a lot more pictures.

First some background: We purchased the lot using a lot loan in August 2013.  In the spring of 2014 we started to work with our architect to put some plans together.  We had a pretty good idea of what we wanted and we were able to find a similar floorplan that the architect was able to adjust to our needs. Our drawings were completed in early June, we bid the documents out during July, selected our contractor in August and finalized our construction loan in September.

This first picture is from September 2013.  We closed on the lot in August and this was the first time that we made it up to the lot after we were the proud owners of this land and the earth down to the core.

The photo is from last December.  The house 2 down from ours (to the south) was just starting construction.

Spring. Looking east.

The 4th of July. Looking north.

This picture is also from July.  I'm standing on the SE corner of our lot, looking to the NW.

Our neighbor started bringing in lots of fill dirt to level out his backyard and and move the steep slope at the back of his lot to the west.  When we purchased the property and first had it surveyed, we found out that from the SE corner of our lot to the SW corner of our lot the elevation dropped over 50'!

This stake sat along the south edge of the property.  The stake at the rear of the property sits down at the bottom of this steep slope.  Granite Construction Company owns the land behind ours and we are working to negotiate a permanent slope easement on their property.  This will allow us to bring in fill dirt in order to raise the back edge of our property to be level with the rest of our backyard.  The slope that currently is at the rear of our property would then be pushed onto Granite's property and allow us to have a fairly large backyard (our lot is around 1/2 acre).

This picture was taken just a couple of days before excavation started for out basement.  I'm now standing on 30+ feet of the import dirt at the back of our lot.  I was not interested in paying very much for the import dirt, but our excavator offered a deal of $10 a load to bring it from another project that they were working on. I think they ended up bringing nearly 300 loads of dirt in.

Next post: Week 1 and the start of excavation.