Preparing the Site

Things are starting to move along pretty quickly now.  In previous posts, we've put the road in and gotten the well dug (with some drama) along with some other descriptions of the land and our reasons for moving from Australia to Texas.  Over the next few weeks, we'll be going from a relatively bare and unused piece of land to something with a relatively large building on it.

We're constructing something called a Barndaminium (or Barndominium depending on your spelling).  The basis for the building is a steel building from a basically stock design.  To that, we're adding a very large porch (12' wide by 52' along the front and 52' down the west side, all covered).  Inside of half of the building, we're constructing a 2 bedroom cottage with relatively large rooms.  We'll be talking quite a bit about the construction of the cottage, so we won't put that in this post.  Today, we'll describe the activities undertaken to get the site prepared.

We selected a site on the property where we could have a somewhat level area as well as having some nice trees to provide a good vista both from the house and from the porch where we will do a lot of outside living.  In some of the pictures, hopefully you'll be able to see that, but I think we have a very nice area that's relatively close to the eastern border of the property but not too close to any buildings on the eastern property.  Also, we have quite a few trees on the east and south sides of the building, providing a nice backdrop as well as good screening.  Access is down the road from the main road to the north and around the west side of the building to the garage area.

Here's some pictures of the leveling operation:

I had a bit of frustration with the trees in this picture.  I really didn't want to remove this stand of trees.  We had tried to arrange the building to minimise the number of trees we removed.  However, when the guys staked out the outline of the building, it was pretty obvious that if this stand didn't get removed, they would cause problems for the building in the future.  They were even causing problems in the short term.  The property drops 61" from front to back (another negative surprise requiring a lot more work and cost to level).  Without moving the trees, we wouldn't be able to remove much dirt from the upper end of the building meaning that the lower end would have to be build up the 5' drop.  I really didn't want to have the back of the building that high above the surrounding grade, so removing half the material from the top half and moving it to the lower half was the best answer.  Removing trees made that possible so down came the trees.  With about 300 trees on the property, a small stand didn't make a big difference, but still.....

Here's some other views of the leveling operation and you'll get a feel of how much time, equipment and effort is required for a project like this.  It makes you wonder how long it took to level large areas prior to the advent of Bobcats, backhoes and other large mechanical bulldozers.

Now that we have a nice, cleared, level area, we'll get to see the creation of the forms and other activities leading up to the completion of the "ground phase" of the building.