Building Permit: RECEIVED! Time to prep the site.

As the title of this post implies, as of May 30 we now have our building permit! HOORAY! Now that we finally have the go-ahead, we have begun work marking and leveling the site.

We started out simply by scraping away topsoil around the approximate footprint of the house. (You can see we have also had a bunch of lumber delivered for forms we will eventually build for when the footers are to be poured.) Next we placed stakes at the corners of the house, which we made sure were accurate by measuring lengths, widths, and diagonals.

That makes it sound nice and easy to place the corners, when in fact it was a lot of work, particularly because we want to make sure we are oriented as correctly as possible to solar south for when the solar array is installed. We used several different methods to make sure our alignments were correct: aligning to the shadow of a long (over 15'!) vertically level stick at exactly solar noon (as determined from sunrise/sunset times on a given date... but even those aren't entirely accurate due to varying definitions of true sunrise/sunset); measuring against magnetic north using the correct declination as obtained from the NOAA website; and even a little experiment using a giant pendulum. It turns out that all these methods were accurate to within about a half a degree of each other, and we couldn't really hope for better accuracy than that. After initially placing the corners, we hung string to make sure we were aligned to solar south and made adjustments as necessary until we had the most accurate and agreeable lengths, widths, diagonals, and alignments as we could realistically achieve. Phew!

Now that we have the corners determined and the site relatively level (by sight only at this point), the next step is to determine what's truly level. We will do this by using a water level, which works on the principle that water always tries to find its own level. By filling a large bucket in the center of the area with water and filling a flexible tube with said water (with absolutely no bubbles), we can mark the water level on the tube and use that to determine a constant height in each of the corners. And, voila! We will have a level plane to work from. After that, we'll use the plane to mark out trenches and START DIGGING!

Updated budget:
+$504.80 - $10/sq ft for the building permit fee plus a $300 recreational fee
TOTAL SPENT SO FAR: $40,758.09