On February 8, site work began! After years of wandering the Texas hill country trying to decide on a place, after another 2 years and 7 months of planning and design, work on the house is beginning! The first thing to be done is to take care of the sloping land issue mentioned earlier. The plan is to make about a 6 foot cut in the ground at the front of the site, then level the house site. Once all graded out, this will give a short (4 feet or so) earth/rock berm in front of the house. It will make the back of the house about 4 feet above grade. We can take care of much of that by bring in fill to bring the back yard up closer to the level of the back of the house. We should have plenty of fill from the front cut to fill in the back. This is not ideal, but much better than having the back of the house elevated by 9 feet. When we bought the lot, we knew it had some slope and not much of a view. But the lot is in a good location and should meet our needs well. In hindsight a wider more level lot would be better. Finding such a place is difficult and costly. Every place has compromises and we’ve been able to make the site work out.
Site work started by clearing some cedar trees from the building site. The lot has cedar (juniper), persimmon, and oak trees. Most of the trees are along the side property lines, but there is a significant wooded area at the back of the lot. More on that later. We are keeping as many of the trees as possible, but there are several cedars that must be removed to make room for the house. The sitework contractor started scraping dirt and removing trees. They moved the dirt to the back of the lot so it can be used as fill later. The trees were mulched and hauled away.
