Clearing for the House!!

We spent a rather cold day today clearing out where the house will be.  While this clearly has to get done before we excavate for the house, it is a bit more pressing because we need more cedar poles to finish the garden fence.  Did I mention that the whole area is overgrown with cedars? 

Here's a look at where we started.  Pay attention to where the few little cedar bits are laying on the ground - its an important reference point for later.

before we started (mostly)

Jeremy started cutting down all the brush with the chain saw and I drug the cut bits into a brush pile.  Around 11, our friend Daniel Diliberto arrived to help (thank goodness!) and between the two of us we were able to keep up with Jeremy.  As we went, when Jeremy found a tree of the right size, he would cut all the limbs off and we would stack it in the "poles" pile.  Everything else went in the brush pile.  Remember the few cedar bits in the picture above?  Here's what that spot looked like when we were done:

And here are the poles we cut:

We managed to create a pretty nice sized clearing - about 45x50 or so.  It looks something like this:

Here's 2/3 of our work crew (I'm behind the camera) when we finally stopped for the day. 

You may be wondering what our kids were doing while the adults cleared brush.  They spent their time breaking rocks and building a pretty cool little fort!  I love that we spent 5 hours in literally freezing weather (the temp didn't go above 30 while we were there) and my kids not only didn't complain, they found productive uses for their time and had a blast!  Parental nirvana.

Catherine in the fort

This week we'll continue working on the garden fence and will likely do some more clearing.  Every day, little up, right?