Foundation walls poured and well drilled

On Friday we got final word on the well. 225 feet deep, with about 6-7 gallons per minute recovery rate. The 225 feet is probably about average for the area, and right about at our budget number for the well cost. I was happy with the depth. Our builders say 6-7 gallons per minute is "pretty good" so that sounded great to me too.

Backyard well location relative to SE corner of the house:

Also on Friday the foundation walls were poured.  Here's some new pictures but they aren't too exciting compared to the prior pictures showing the unpoured foundation forms:

View from SE corner:

Garage view:

And of course every visit involves our little explorers climbing dirt hills:

Next up is the excavator coming back in Tuesday and back filling the house, and hopefully clearing more backyard for us as we requested.

Foundation forms in

I'm a couple days behind on updates and news, but for now I'll just share pictures from 2 days ago (Thursday). I went to check out the progress and most of the forms were up. Nearly time to pour the foundation walls...

Looking toward the east side of the house:

View from SW corner:

West end of garage, with main house on right:

West side of house, with garage on left:

Tomorrow I plan on going out to the site again, so should have updated pictures with foundation poured, plus some info on the well. 

Footings, and more easement drama

The major excitement this week causing gray hairs was finding out that the electric could not be run in given the current easement language (why this wasn't an issue last year when we were less than 24 hours away from doing the same thing is a mystery).  After several calls and a meeting at the St. Louis County Land department, I was armed with a letter stating that utilities could be run.  The county didn't really have an issue with it, but wanted to get it in writing (something we all can agree with!)

Besides the easement drama, footings were poured this week, and Minnesota Power did end up coming in on Thursday, staking out where they will trench the line and verifying with us where put the transformer.  We went back out there on Friday with the kids and of course they spent the time playing with sticks and climbing dirt hills.

Here's a sampling of pictures from this week:

Garage on right, house on left:

Looking toward front of house from southwest corner:

Looking across house from northeast corner:

Exploring by southwest corner of house:

I think we should put the well right here, Dad:

I wonder when Mom will make us get down?

Foundation work fully underway

It's been a long extended weekend since I last made an entry.  I suddenly exploded in case of strep infection during the night Friday night, complete with 103 temps and alternating periods of shivering cold and dripping in sweat. As an added bonus, this was Christina's weekend to cover at the hospital so she was gone 7:30 am to 9:00 pm both Saturday and Sunday.  I was beat to say the least!  Seth was my hero though because he watched the kids Sunday afternoon so I could go to urgent care, and got them McDonald's for dinner!  Still was miserable all day Monday, but now on Tuesday I'm starting to get back to normal...just in time to drive out to the site this morning to pick a spot for the well.

As I was typing up the most recent entry last Friday, the excavator was already out at the site digging out the garage.  He was back on Monday and finished digging out the foundation completely.  I drove out there this morning to meet the well driller and Jamie but the first people to show up were the foundation guys who were there to start setting up stuff in preparation for pouring the footings later this week.

Jamie, Dan (well dude) and I checked out the location suggested by Mark for the well.  It's in the corner of the backyard.  But there are still some more trees that I want cleared, so it's not really in what will be the final backyard corner.  Jamie still needs to talk to Chris (excavator) about the additional trees I want cut, then we should be able to shove the well more to what ultimately will be the edge of the yard.  Dan says that well depths are all over the board in this area...some really shallow, and some really deep.  Let's just keep hoping for shallow!

This morning I took some new pictures with the foundation dug and the entire land/slope reshaped:

Looking south toward the front of the house.  Front of garage is on right side of picture, front porch is on left side of picture further back:

Still looking south, just up closer to the hole:

Standing at NE corner of the house, right outside the master bath:

and still standing at NE corner, but looking west toward garage:

View from SE corner, approximate location of well.  This is the master bedroom corner:

And a view from the side yard, looking west toward the house, as my assistant tries to keep up with me:

Excavation begins...and other headaches

We met the excavator at the land to go over our proposed "new" outline of where the house would sit.  We talked a lot of the grade of the land, what locations would require more fill than others, and pros/cons of all sorts of things.  Main concerns were having to potentially pay for a lot more fill, and potentially ending up with a backyard like a "bowl" if we had to dig it out to allow for a walkout.  The excavator seems like a nice honest guy who isn't worried about reasonable extra labor (like tree clearing) but needed to be able to recoup his cost if we need more fill brought in than he budgeted in his initial bid.  Makes sense to me.

In the end, after the excavator went out there again and took a lot of detailed measurements.  It basically boiled down to the position we had picked was the best possible weighing all the pros and cons.  It will cost us a little more for material that needs to be brought in, but in the end we will have the house sitting where we want it, with south-facing windows, and plenty of room for garage apron and driveway approach on the north side.  Once the excavator checked out the potential backyard slope, he decided there was enough of a slope to be able to grade the backyard without any problems.  The next day he was back clearing backyard trees already! 

It turns out that while we had the septic location planning and testing done last fall, we never did get a permit.  So we had to go to the county offices yesterday afternoon to pay for that.  Unfortunately they said it would take up to 10 business days, and the excavator is nearly ready to roll on that piece right now.

We have our siding, shakes, soffit, fascia, and window colors all picked out.  Nice to have that behind us.  Next up is exterior stone and shingles.

We got a little surprise for our current landlord yesterday.  Our lease is up on July 31.  The landlord is offering us two options.  One is to sign another lease through February.  Our house is scheduled to be done by mid-December, and the rent at this house is really high.  The other option is to lease month-to-month.  The problem with month-to-month is that it is possible with 30 day notice that they could rent this place to another tenant.  Neither option is particularly appealing.  Seth's new town home (1500 sq feet) is a possible contingency plan, but that isn't too exciting of an arrangement either.  Just another tough decision to be made I guess.

The joys of home building!

The final steps before work begins

Once again I've allowed several steps in our journey to go by without updating the blog.  So this will be another entry with a variety of mini-milestones.

Shortly before our construction loan closing date, we decided to do a little investigating into the official easement on which our driveway was built.  What started as a simply question about if we could gate off the driveway turned into multiple conversations with the title company, the bank, our builder, our original builder Bob who sold us the land, and eventually a real estate lawyer.  It was a little nerve-wracking with a lot of happy thoughts like "why didn't we look into this last fall" and "I can't wait until our house ends up landlocked -- that will really help its value."

Kidding aside, we got some questions answered and feel good about going forward:

Our driveway is on an easement through State owned tax-forfeited land.  This means the driveway is open to the public up to the point where it turns onto our 40 acres.  We had assumed this and were expecting this, but now we know for sure.  This means we can't officially block access with any sort of locking gate.  But Bob told us that in all the years he hunted there, he only had one person come down the driveway, and that was the "front 40" neighbor and his dog just to say "hi".  Plus, there is really not much of a reason to go down to driveway as the public land is relatively small (about four 40-acre parcels), its surrounded by private parcels, and a lot of it is borderline swampy.

Our lawyer's opinion was that there were some passages in the easement he would change.  There were provisions in the easement that the State could cancel it for mining purposes, or if it wasn't maintained properly, both with 30 day notices.  He wasn't particularly comfortable with those passages, even though he wasn't too concerned.  He's started the process of editing out those sections and is pretty sure we will get it changed.  He was fairly sure the State would not be interested in just selling us the strip of land the easement is on.  Maybe after all this dust settles we will look into if we can buy a bigger sized parcel that contains the driveway...but until then we will have plenty of other house-related expenses to drain our wallets.

We did go ahead and close our our construction loan on Thursday May 6.  Fairly uneventful except for the 5-figure check we had to hand over the the title company.  I guess building a house does cost money.

Later than same day, we met our builder, Mark, along with his excavator (Chris) out at the land to have an initial discussion on house location.  We tentatively marked out the outline and location of the house.  Seems like we can't push the house as far west as we would like because we have to leave lots of space around the septic mound in the NW corner of the cleared land.  We also knew we had to clear some more trees to have a nicer backyard, and Chris hinted that he thought the land was already cleared and hadn't planned for that in his bid..  Mark later told us not to worry, he will get Chris to do it.  Mark's been pretty good at coming through on things like that.

Another thing that will have to be done is increase the slope in order to accommodate the walk out basement.  I'm not quite sure how they are going to do it as I don't want them to just dig out the backyard and move it to the front.  I'm envisioning a very muddy swimming pool in our backyard each spring if they simply do that.  We will talk to them more tomorrow about that plan.

We took a few pictures while we were out there that day..not too much has changed from prior pictures so nothing too exciting here...

Getting ready to meet the excavator:

Looking east from approximate location of apron in front of garage:

And looking south from same location:

Earlier today, armed with stakes and yellow tape bought at Home Depot, Christina and I went out to the land to take a second look at the house location.  We decided to shift it to the west a little bit, and to turn it more square to the south.  The day we were there with the excavator we turned it a little to face the incoming driveway.  But in retrospect, turning it more square to the south should give us more sun, and the view approaching the house is still great since it sits back pretty far from the driveway.  Tomorrow we meet Mark and Chris back out at the land to hopefully make a final decision for an excavation plan.

Some pictures from today:
 
Looking south at house location...stretch of tape starting on right of picture is the front of the garage:

 Looking northwest toward house location from the east end of the side yard:

And same location, except looking more west:

Coffee break:

Looking north from the eventual backyard toward the house:

Cutest measuring assistant:

Just us and the ticks:

And one other critical issue was resovled today.  Yes, you can access Facebook from the land location: