STAKEOUT DAY BONUS NEW HOUSE UPDATE

 So Tuesday was a special day.  If any of you saw our Instagram post you already know.  It was stakeout day!

2nd Man and I took a 1/2 day off because at 9am, we had to meet a guy out there to do our site evaluation and then stakeout.  We left downtown at 8:07 and got there at 9:01.  Pretty good timing, ha.

What they do is evaluate the site to see where the house will sit, what direction it will face, what needs to be cleared, what do we need to do ahead of time, etc.

It was hot.  Ugh.  And humid.  Double ugh.  And we were trying to beat the rain!

We talked and walked around.  He had our architectural drawings and scale maps/satellite photos, etc.  Once we had things more or less decided, he started staking.

What he likes to do is not only put the "footprint rectangle" stakes in, but he likes to shape the outline of the building (as much as he can) so we can visualize things.  That's kind of fun.  Above is standing in the 'future driveway', looking along the front side of the house.  Here, you can see where the front porch, the kitchen, the hallway, the study will be...

...and here is the guest room, the master bedroom closet, and the master bedroom itself.  The rest of the house is inside the footprint of the existing house, no real way to section those off but this gave us a great visual representation of what we'll see.

Here is something that caused us to make a change.

The entire footprint of the new house was moved forward about 10 feet.  The reason is in the picture above.  The circle is the old septic tank.  It will be removed, of course, and filled in, they have to do this often.  The issue is, the original footprint would have put the master bedroom floor over it.  Chances are, there would be no issues but you never know about settling.  He suggested it would better to have the slab 'outside' of that area.  We decided to move the whole house forward by about 10 feet but our front yard is huge, so no issue there.  Plus, this gives us 10 more feet of backyard which is where our orchard area is so hey, more planting area for me?  Ha.  No, nothing new with roots close to the house but we can have some chairs back there for deer watching!  Or a hot tub?

Hmm...decisions decisions.

Here is the back corner of the garage.  We also moved the house over a few feet so that our existing driveway can run almost right straight into the garage.

As you can see, that puts it a bit closer to some brush so some clearing will need to be done ahead of time.  But it's OK, because we wanted to clear this area anyway.  The tree is still about 20 feet away (hard to tell from the angle) but we'll have some of those branches trimmed.  There is also a large "hackberry" tree just off camera that will need to come down because it's too close the house if it ever fell (and with our changing weather patterns, you never know).

Overall, we had a blast and are so excited.  The guy told us that of all the properties he has seen so far this month, ours was the best in terms of house location and few issues.  Our driveway, culvert, etc. were fine.  He said most of the time, people point to a densely forested area with bushes and poison oak and snakes and brush and they say "we want the front door there and the bedroom over there".  Meaning they have LOTS of work to do first.  Our only bullet point list is to trim a tree, cut some bushes, cut down a tree and, oh yeah, remove the house.  They are about two months away at this point from breaking ground.  Next step is a soil sample for them to be able to engineer the slab.

It's happening!