On Saturday, Fred (a surveyor from my work) and I located 20 of the house corners so that they could get started on building the foundation footings next week.  After nearly 7 ½ hours outside in the sun we were done!  It was gorgeous outside and actually a lot of fun.  I haven’t worked with Fred all that much since he’s usually in the field and I’m in the office, but it was really great to get to know him more and he re-taught me a lot about surveying.  Things have really changed since my surveying class at UW 12 years ago…the instruments that we used today were robotic and would automatically follow and track wherever you moved the prism.  And of course we did things perfectly – to the nearest hundredth.  If Matt’s crew builds it that accurately it’d be amazing!

To save a bit of money, instead of using a surveyor to stake out the house for the excavation, Matt used known locations on the property and with a few measurements I gave him to each of the property corners he got a rough idea of where the house was going to sit.  But he had to tape them off and on a sloped site that can be a little tricky!  To give the crew some working room, over-excavate by about 5′ anyhow for the foundation so it didn’t need to be exact.  And although it would have been nice to have a surveyor prior to excavating (so you knew that you were absolutely sure you were digging in the right spot), not doing so saved us hundreds!  Fred was really impressed at how accurate Matt measured out the excavation dig though – he was pretty well on point with being 5′ wider than the actual house corners and extremely parallel too!  In addition to surveying the house corners, we also surveyed the proposed well location which is pretty important since the 100’ well radius covenant area encroaches onto our neighbor’s property.

A panoramic shot of the property at the beginning of the day.

Our survey truck.

The total station and prism that we used to survey the house corners.

The total station we used which was so much more high-tech than then ones I learned surveying on at UW!

Quick shot of one of the property corners we set.

At the end of the day we had all 20 points surveyed for the house.

Here is our site plan.  Earlier in the week, I located all of the coordinates for the house corner points (and the well location) to guide us throughout the day.

Just as we were surveying the well location, Brad Johnson from Johnson Drilling (well driller) came by to check out the graded road.  As it turns out, Matt needs to increase the area of the drilling pad some more next week since the well wasn’t quite in the location we had thought it was.  Good thing we surveyed it!

After we were done surveying, Joel brought the boys by to check it out.  Of course now that it was staked it was fun for them to see where their bedrooms were exactly going to be!

Check out each of the boys standing in their future bedrooms!

Spencer on top of the world…errr, stockpile!