Guesswork

Clearing our site has taken a lot of guesswork.

Last Thursday, our surveyor staked out the basement for our house. This stake may not look like much, but it represents months of planning and hard-work.

I was excited to see where the stakes would be placed and I was nervous as we've spent months carefully felling trees to make way for the house, the driveway, and the construction equipment.

After 9 months of work, the survey showed that we'd done a pretty good job of clearing the site. All the trees were down. I was still alive.

The surveyor quickly found out that I'd been a little too careful: two massive oaks were in the way of the site. One was sitting squarely in the space reserved for our future office. The second, a massive double-oak, was too close to the future porch.

Looks like 40 oaks is about to be 38.