At the end of August the building site clearing project started. In order to determine exactly where our house was going to be, we had to first find out where the soil would perk. Since sandy soil is so rare on the peninsula, it’s extremely common for people to be forced to have holding tanks rather than conventional septic systems. But we got lucky; although there are striations of clay, most of the soil in our 40 acres is sandy or sandy-loam. Still, we didn’t know for sure if our first-choice building site would pass the perk test.
Here you can see the soil tester digging test holes. He did a few different holes to establish a broad perimeter around the building site. The first five holes he dug found a striation of clay a few feet down…thin, but enough to cause it not to perk. It was a bit of a nail biter! It’s much cheaper to install a conventional septic than a mound system and we’d also really prefer not to have a holding tank that needs pumping every few months. But as the tester moved closer to our desired building site, the sand was nice and deep. Phew. 🙂 As we were digging we were also pleasantly surprised to find nice deep top-soil throughout the property.
Mike then marked the trees we knew we wanted to keep around the yard–the ones with the most vigor and best crown position–and then began taking down everything else with the mini-excavator. We waited until late summer to begin this work because in the spring and early summer trees are very susceptible to damage from heavy equipment driving over their roots.
Pehr and I stopped out every couple days to check out the progress.
Two months later, it sure looks different out there than it did in this first video! I’ll do a couple more posts about the clearing process, since we took quite a few pictures and videos along the way.
That’s going to be a fun video for Pehr to watch in future years! It’s so great that you are documenting this process of making your dreams come true!