Dirtwork continues

Friday, Nov. 6: Dirtwork continued today. All the big dirt piles around the house are gone, which changes the landscape and view dramatically. There will be a small retaining wall on the east side of the house due to a) wanting to keep the ground level around that side of the porch (we hope to have no railing on the porch) and b) needing to drop the ground down right away for the window in the basement. On the west side of the house, we have no basement windows and so the ground just slowly slopes.



Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 7 & 8: Dirtwork continued, especially work on the pond area. This will be the "dump" station (not dirty water, just the term) for our geothermal open loop system. They dammed up one area of an existing drybed, thus creating more land area and also creating a closed pond. (We don't have any ponds on the property, just what I call "drybeds" which fill up with rainwater occasionally when we have a lot of rain. But with our geothermal system pumping water into here, the idea is to create a pond which actually holds water year-round.)
Looking east:
The sort of "u"-shaped pond

Monday, November 9: The land was smoothed out with a box scraper. This completed the dirtwork.