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"Excavation Begins"
 This is a picture of part of our driveway leading out to Towhee Lane. Unlike most others we tore down the gate. |
 We have 2.5 acres of beautiful woods, but not much sun makes it down to ground level. |
We started with pretty dense woods, not realizing just how much of a slope we had. It was sad to take out so many trees.
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 We only
have 2.5 acres and needed to leave a nice buffer zone of trees between
us and the neighbors for privacy. This was a sad and happy day.
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 Bandon Concrete Co. did quick work
of taking just enough trees to get plenty of Southern exposure and sun
on our home site. We used the lumber later for our deck.
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 They excavated a road down to the lower lever to make it easier to bring materials closer to the building site. This helped tremendously with heavy materials like rebar. |
 An engineer had to perform
a compaction test on the soil making sure it would hold a log home. This machine shakes the earth for miles.
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 We needed 19 dump truck loads of
fill even after we dug into the hillside for our daylight basement. All
of which needed plenty of compacting.
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 No substitute for heavy equipment for filling and compacting. Originally we thought digging into the hillside would give us enough dirt for filling the rest. |
 The mess from taking out trees was overwhelming. We dug a large hole and burned most of the debris. Lots of smoke. Most stumps burned up. |
 This is a view of Towhee Lane from our driveway toward the end of the road. Mostly nice neighbors. |
 This is a view of Towhee Lane from our driveway toward Tom Smith Road. The trucks tore it up pretty bad. |
 We had an existing septic system but the house was lower. We needed a secondary tank and pump uphill to the original. |
 This is the trench to pump the liquid sewage uphill to the original septic system and drain field. It works well, even though a little illogical. |
 We needed to build a pump house and clear room for a 2,500 gallon water storage tank. Good practice. |
 This is a picture of the finished pump house and storage tank. The first construction we did. A quick $500. |