Groundbreaking!

We are very excited to announce that we have officially broken ground on our house project. Hooray! The excavator came this morning and by noon they had cleared away the grass on the property and dug a nice hole in the outline of the house. Here are some pictures and a video for your enjoyment!

This is me with the gas line from the house that was previously on the property.

Here's a video that includes me with the builders. We're talking about our friend Adam who stopped by the lot earlier in the day and sent us a photo -- thanks, Adam!

Un-delay! Un-delay!

Arriba! Larry and Blake worked some kind of black magic over at the city and managed to convince them to grant us the build permit, even though the property line issue will take a few more weeks to finish up. This means we break ground on Monday - less than a week later than we originally thought! Not bad. They'll be getting started while we're at work, so no golden shovel groundbreaking ceremony. But I'll be sure to get some pictures of the carnage.

Delay

We have run into a problem getting a build permit from the City. Apparently there is a rule that you can't build a structure across a property line, even if you own both pieces of property, even if there was already a house built across the line before, even if the pieces are taxed and assessed as one unit, and even if you asked them months ago if there would be any problems building there and they said "no."

Actually, we can build across the line if we pay a bunch of money and file a document that says the obvious boundary is also the actual boundary. Seriously. This will take about three weeks.

Contract signed!

We met with Blake and Larry again today and finally signed our official building contract! So this is it -- no turning back now. I'm so excited because now things are really moving along. The builders will get their permit from the city to begin the build, and then they anticipate we should break ground in about two or three weeks. It's crazy to think that we're actually getting started soon. They estimate that once we start building, it should take about seven months to complete the home. Unless Stuart keeps asking for a bunch of changes to the plan, which he tends to do...
:-)