Day One of Construction of the Building!

Now the real excitement begins.  So far, everything that's been done (and a lot has been done) is at or below ground level.  And while that work is vitally important to the success of the project, it has been hard to see progress.  Pouring concrete was pretty exciting, but now that the building is going up, it's really exciting.  Before the work could be done, though, the steel had to be delivered and that wasn't without problems.  Check out these pictures:

Seems the truck took out the mailboxes on the other side of the road and finally had to remove our mailbox to have room to swing the very long trailer into our relatively narrow gate.  But that wasn't the end of their problems.  Once through the gate, the managed to get the truck stuck in the very soft sand around the building.  We've apparently only had 3/4" of rain all year so far and to say the ground is dry would be an understatement.  Even when there's a relatively normal rain, the soil on the property is as sandy and soft as any you'll see anywhere.  No one seems to believe you when you warn them either:

But they got the steel unloaded, truck out of the sand and then got to work in a hurry.  Lots of activity today.  Here's the pictures:

They have a pretty neat way of putting the trusses on the poles.  The next few pictures show how they use a hoist rig in the back of a pickup truck to hoist the trusses up onto the poles where they connect via slots to the poles.

The only problems today were problems associated with having a new crew at the site.  They knocked a mailbox over at the neighbors, got their truck stuck and left the gate open so that our daugter's horse got out and was difficult to persuade to come back in given all the noise and activity.  The horse is back in, the gate shut and hopefully the neighbor's mailbox repaired.  All in all, a lot of work done in one day!
It's pretty exciting to see all this work going on.  I can't wait to see the batch of pictures from tomorrow and days following.  And then I'll be heading out a week from Saturday (assuming this Chilean volcanic ash doesn't continue to cause flight problems in this part of the world).  I ordered a bunch of wood and materials this morning from Lowe's.  That'll all be delievered on the 22nd so that it's all there when we get there.