We were originally slated to break ground on August 15th. That didn’t happen because we were still in loan limbo.
Then we were supposed to break ground on September 6th, but we needed to have more trees cut down and moved out of the way.
On September 13th, the most glorious thing happened: A convoy of heavy equipment showed up and started mowing down everything in its path.
Since then it’s been nonstop sawing, digging, and dozing from dawn to dusk and I’m LIVING for it.
I do want to take a moment to mentally pour one out for all the vegetation we’re losing. The house is a rancher, so the footprint is pretty big. And we needed to clear enough area to 1) accommodate the house, 2) avoid having a tree fall on the house, and 3) allow enough ventilation and sunlight in to keep moisture issues at bay.
At one point while we were walking through a warzone of tree tops and stumps, Mike made a comment about feeling like the bad guy in FernGully and I agreed. As a pagan who has loved the woods since I could walk… this degree of slash-and-burn is devastating.
And I do mean slash-and-burn. We didn’t have the time to cut smaller trees and tops into firewood because we had to make up for lost time. So the excavator pushed all the tops, stumps, and other leftovers into a pile and burned it.
Buuut, we can’t live in the trees and if you wanna make an omelette, you gotta break a few eggs. Or that’s what I’m telling myself over and over. We plan on doing a massive tree-plant once construction is done in an attempt to replace some of what we decimated. And we’re going to install a wild yard, consisting of mostly hardscaping and native plants instead of grass. Hopefully, we’re not throwing the local ecosystem too far out of balance.
House of Hyperbole 