Clearing The Building Site...

Trouble Checking Out The Building Site

It's been about five weeks since we applied for our building permit and while we are waiting we thought we'd start clearing a building site.  The house was designed with an elevated deck over a walkout basement on the right elevation so we could situate it on a small hillside and take advantage of the mountain views to the North and East.  One of our primary concerns with the site is being sure we won't have trees blowing down on the house... the appeal of leaving mature trees around the house quickly diminishes when you imagine a 4000lb hemlock landing on you in the middle of a wind storm, so we started by knocking over any trees that could potentially reach the house should they blow over.

Excavator Knocking Over Trees

It's amazing what you can do with an excavator...If  I had one of these things I'd be digging holes everywhere, all day long... that's probably why Margaret won't let me get one!  There is a small drainage creek about twenty yards through the trees to the left of the excavator and our plan is to clear everything up to this creek.  It should make it easier to look after the future lawn but with the trees on the other side of the creek, we will still have privacy from our neighbor.  In total we took out about twenty trees of varying sizes and a whole lot of salmon berries.  The bears in our area spend the summer feeding on salmon berries and as long as you don't leave garbage out, they keep to themselves.

Cleared To The Creek

A few hours later the bulk of the trees have been cleared.  Although hemlock trees have very little commercial value, we will be putting a load together to send to a local mill where they will be chipped for pulp.  The only other options are to burn them or bury them and at this time of year neither is a great option.  At this point there are still alot of roots and twigs in the soil and at sometime next spring we will be inviting all our good friends and family to a beer drinking/BBQ/beer drinking/stick picking/beer drinking party where we'll mostly drink beer, eat BBQ, and ignore the sticks on the ground.

After The Bull Dozer

After clearing the site, Neal (our clearing guy) went over the area with a bull dozer and started grading some of the depressions left from clearing the trees.



Mountain View to the East

This will be the view from the front of the house, looking east.  In the distance, just behind the excavator, you can see the guest house.  This is where we will house guests who've had a few too many or who don't pick enough sticks at the party. 

Today we started extending the driveway to the building site with gravel that came from the river bed at the end of our street.  So far we've dumped 15 truckloads for the driveway base and may need a few more once we know the final elevation of the foundation.  About eight loads of gravel have been stock-piled at the end of the driveway and will be spread when we start digging the foundation.

View to the North

Eventually we will remove some of the these trees to open up our view of the mountains to the North.  This will be the view from the elevated deck on the right side of the house.

At this point we've done about all we can do until we have our building permit.  The Fraser Valley Regional District has required us to create a covenance which will allow us to live in the mobile home while we build.  It's this covenance that is delaying our building permit as it needs to be signed by the bank holding our mortgage.  In typical corporate fashion, our bank does not have anyone capable of signing the covenance in any of it's hundreds of branches on the west coast so the covenance had to be sent to their offices in Ontario... we've been waiting four weeks now for a signature from the bank!  Our local branch claims it should be signed and ready on monday afternoon so we are staying optimistic and hoping we may have our permit by the end of this coming weekend... I'm sure anyone who has dealt with the FVRD is on the floor laughing right now!