Breaking Ground!

Carson and I have officially started building our new home! We are having a blast with this new adventure and wanted to keep you updated on what's happening. I am really behind on posting the progress, so I will try and catch you up to speed! Being your own general contractor is a LOT of work, but it is definitely worth it in the end. It really is a full-time job, and I am grateful I've had the hours each day to make sure we get the best bids from the best places. I was able to gather 5 or more bids for each job on the house, so we have a good selection of subs from Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming to choose from. Now it's my job to contact them, barter the prices to fit our budget, and get them scheduled back-to-back so we can be done before winter! Here's what's happened so far!

BEFORE.AFTER!

This sign was on our lot when we bought it.... surrounding contractors thought it was ok to clean out their cement trucks on our land...

Carson surveying the lot. Can I just say how glad I am that I married a genius? He literally aced all of the hardest engineering classes at the U, including the dreaded math ones! Calculations are cake for him, which is a good thing because I had absolutely NO clue what he was doing! All I know is that surveying is important to get the house in the exact right spot on your lot--and that it involves a lot of math...I don't know if I even remember how to use a graphing calculator anymore... that's one of the reasons I loved BYU's music program....very little math involved.
We rented a huge trackhoe and tried to get all of it done in one day... you will come to find from later posts that we had MUCH more work than one day, but at least the basic shape got done with the track hoe! Here's Carson digging the corner of our basement out.

Carson's boss Frank and Tyler, (the other engineer Carson works with), were kind enough to help us all day Saturday. Frank is holding the measuring stick while Tyleragets it lined up. The measuring stick and I became great friends after this day when it was just the two of us finishing the dirt work.Thanks Frank!Thanks Tyler!
Boys and their big toys... I will never understand why they love it so much...