...going....and gone

It took me a while to place just which part of the house this picture was and finally the ivy did it for me. It was the door that threw me; that is the spot where the downstairs door was but that isn't the right door. This pic shows one half of the house with the top floor gone. Looks like the ivy is the only thing holding the house up at this point.
I tried very hard to give away some of that ivy but for some reason got no takers. Can't believe that no-one wanted to have their house overgrown with lovely thick ivy vines so they could pretend to be a princess in a Grimm's fairy tale.
Was always a fight keeping that darn stuff under control. That and the hundreds of baby holly trees springing up in the flower beds each year. The hollies are gone now, along with a few 'significant' trees that were inspected, measured, and plotted on a plan before it was agreed that the trees would be INSIDE the new houses if they were left standing.
Quite an ordeal just getting rid of a few trees:
After giving buckets of money to a tree surveyor, a tree inspector and a landscape architect, then having the city's tree inspector take a look (he didn't get any money, that would be called bribery), we were finally allowed to give many more buckets of money to City Hall (not bribery, that's "tree permit fees") for the privilege of paying someone else a few more buckets of money to cut those trees down.

Now the lot looks something like this:

Intentionally blurry so you get a feeling for what it looked like in real-life through my rain-smeared glasses, in the pouring rain, when I dropped off the site plans to the demolition guy (Bob the un-builder). That soggy green stuff in the fore-ground? That's what grass looks like in the winter, under water. Just a typical 'Wetcoast' winter's day. Oh well, at least rain doesn't have to be shoveled.
The orange fences have been there for the past 6-7 months, protecting the trees that we are keeping. I kept wondering when the city was going to supply the llamas and sheep that go in the pens to keep the grass & dandelions under control all summer but they never showed up. This forced Kim to commit the almost-criminal act of breaching the tree fences to get a lawn-mower inside.

Tomorrow he and the boys get to play with a 1,000-pound Tamper, tamping down sand. The whole site - three times. Darn, too bad I have a guild meeting I have to be at. Actually, we got lucky with the soil composition, it could have been a lot more expensive to prep the site. It's rather frustrating trying to grow a garden in clay (my Mom spent decades 'amending' it) but it's a GOOD thing when you're building a house.