Let’s start with some excellent news: Punxsutawney Phil did NOT see his shadow!

This is a big deal when you’re hoping to break ground in the next few weeks.

Speaking of that, I got really excited earlier this week when I received an email that said “construction permit approved”.  I forwarded it to Joshua with roughly 1,000 exclamation points.  He texted me to gently inform me that that approval was not what I thought it was.  Had I taken the time to read the next two words in the email subject line, I would have seen the words “conventional system”, which refers to the type of septic system we will have.  This was an email confirming our septic permit approval, which we knew had been approved several weeks back.

Oh well.

Another email came through this week that said “Permit decline reasons”.  As excited as I was about the previous email, I was equally deflated upon receiving this one.  It turns out the “decline reasons” weren’t really for anything we could have anticipated.  We had carefully reviewed all checklists and submittal requirements before we sent in our plans, but the county likes to come up with additional items because they can.  We ran into this earlier in the process with our plat so weren’t entirely surprised.

Thankfully, we should be able to satisfy these additional requirements, and hopefully get our building permit any day now.

Patiently waiting….

In the meantime, we drove out to the property Friday evening to review where the house had been staked by the surveyor as we had indicated it on our site plan.  We are really trying to save the tree that is in front of the house.  The driveway will run between the tree and the front porch so we wanted to make sure there will be enough clearance.  We decided that we’ll need to limb up the tree a bit but that we should be able to keep it.  Whew!

These flags do not photograph well and it’s hard to tell much about the shape of the house, but we verified that edges and corners were in a good spot.  You can see the tips of the tree branches we were discussing on the left.

You can also see Josh photobombing my lovely shot as he was carrying my chair so I could practice sitting on the front porch.

photo credit: Joshua, from the living room

There’s the tree again, this time on the right side.  We confirmed that the west-facing front porch is in a great spot.  This was an overcast evening, but I can’t wait for many spectacular evenings on the front porch, watching the sunset.   I think our realtor thought I was a little nuts, but when we were searching for a piece of land, one of my requirements was that the front of the property had to face west so we could have this setup.

I cannot wait to be sitting on the actual front porch!

On our drive into the property, we spotted a new structure underway at one of the neighboring properties:

I have construction progress envy…