#housepad

Cutting down the trees was the easy part, clearing them, stumps and all the underbrush took far more effort. In order to speed this process up, we rented a mini-excavator for a week and set to work.

Stacking cut down trees with the mini excavator That little machine made quick work of all the fallen trees. Since time was our main concern, we opted to stack the logs in several piles to be dealt with later. The pile above quickly became the largest as it sits between the house site on the left and the driveway on the right.

Clearing the driveway We also used the little machine to start leveling out a house pad, though we still had no idea what type of house we were going to build. Britt loved operating that mini-excavator and it was just incredible how much work could be done with it.

Start to level the house pad area Level the pad proved to more of a challenge than excepted as we had to dig down the embankment between the pad and driveway (where the logs are piled in the picture above). In the end we had a roughly level 50ft x 40ft pad and dug 6ft down into the embankment.