Land Clearing is complete

Well we got all the trees cleared out. It's a bittersweet moment.

Ronny (see last post) took all the debris off site. It would have been nice to bring a portable milling machine to the property. We could have gotten quite a few board feet of oak, pine and cherry. Alas, there just isn't a big business for portable millers and it's just not worth the hit to our budget. This is just another one of those trade-offs that we are making.
We walked the property many, many times before deciding on the final building layout. I'm confident that we could not have saved any more trees with a different house location. So we got that going for our conscience.
He "root raked" only the area that would be under the building foundation. Also, we've got the foreboding orange construction fencing, which actually could be knocked over by a squirrel, but I'm still expecting it to stop any construction equipment from driving under the tree drip lines.

Here's a high definition shot of the cleared lot.



Ok, I didn't have my digital camera so I used my camera phone. Seriously, we can put a man on the moon but we can't make a decent camera phone.



Anywho, the shot is taken from the backside of the house looking toward the street. It's late in the day, but you can see that the house really will have quite a bit of shading from the blazing afternoon sun.

Foundation work should begin next week.