Land Hole!

A couple of weeks ago, Lyle asked us to go and stake off where we wanted our house to go. Ryan and I drove to the land with a sledgehammer, some rebar and a tape measure, and we got to work. We knew basically where we wanted the house to be, and the direction that we wanted it to face. Now we had to mark where exactly we wanted it. It's hard to determine something like that when you're just looking at snow, which shows no depth or height. We hammered our stakes in, and stood back and took a look. We thought that it looked really small, and couldn't believe that it was actually 40 x 32. We also knew that we wouldn't be making it any bigger, so we would have to live with it. When we got home afterwards, we measured the family room into the dining room, and realized that the land just looked small because it was a blank space, and figured that once there was a hole there or a house there, it would look a lot different.

Then, last Monday (March 5th) Lyle called us and told us to go to the land and mark out where our approach is, and mark out where we want the driveway. He wanted this done because on Tuesday, they wanted to start clearing the snow off of the property so that they could get the machines onto the land to start digging the basement. So after work on Monday we went out to the land in our work clothes, threw on our snow boots, and started trudging through the snow, marking where the approach was, and where we wanted the driveway. I told Ryan that I wanted to go and get the camera to take some pictures after we had done this, but we both figured that by the time we got home, changed and got the camera, we wouldn't have that much light left over by which to see what we were doing. So we have no pictures of the land with the driveway marked out.

Tuesday night after work, Ryan and I went to an auction sale at Regent Auctions (that's a story for another post), and afterwards decided that we'd take a drive by the land to see what they'd done that day. Again, with no camera, we headed out to the land and were excited to see (in the dark) that they had cleared the snow away and had put up additional pieces of rebar to mark where the house would be. I'm pretty sure that if the camera was there, all you would see would be a dark background and maybe some flecks of snow, but it would be unrecognizable. Needless to say I was pretty excited when I saw that the snow had been moved. To me, finally it seemed real that we were actually building a house.

Wednesday night was busy for Ryan because of his trade show at work, and Thursday night brought on another auction sale (this one at Kaye's Auctions), so we never got a chance to get out to the land to see if they had done anything more. To be honest, I don't think either one of us even thought about going out there; we were both so beat by the time we got into the car.

Friday after work we had to go and meet Ryan's mom so that she could pick up her new vehicle (2004 Ford Escape) so that someone could drive her vehicle home. I dropped Ryan off and went in for a bit before I went to visit my dad at work. It was a beautiful evening, so I rushed home after visiting with Dad for a bit and decided that I would go and grab my camera and some cds and take a drive to the land to see what had happened to it over the past couple of days, if anything. I took the long way to the land (going down Hwy #206) and looked towards our property and saw piles of dirt...I knew that could only mean one thing. Excited, I sped up a bit, wanting to get there to see if they had started digging. When I got there, I parked on the approach and started to walk onto the land...only to find that it was really really muddy. All I could do was stand on the snowy part of the property and take pictures from where I stood. They had indeed dug out some of the basement but at this point I had no idea how deep it was, but it sure looked like a lot of dirt to me. They had also trucked in three pile of crushed rock for the weeping tile (or so Ryan says). I took some more pictures and headed home.

Saturday came and Ryan and his mom had appointments to get their hair cut in Lorette that morning, so we all piled into the new vehicle, rubber boots and camera in hand, and headed out. After the hair appointments, we drove to the land, donned our rubber boots, and walked to the "dugout". They had dug down only about three feet. It looked like there was way more dirt than that, but I guess if you think about it, it's a rectangle, 40' x 32', dug 3 feet down, so I guess that would produce a lot of dirt. I took more pictures at this point, since we were able to get right into the "dugout".

I realized again that this was actually happening...that it was all real...and that at some point this year, we will have a place to call our own.