Driveway preparation

We've been working with a contractor on prepping our house plans and submitting everything to the county. I'll talk more about all that later, but for now I wanted to put a few random pictures up.

Here's the "lane" left by the surveyors last summer, with a sign left by the septic contractor; this is looking west from the eastern property line, and gives you an idea of how thick some of the brush is:

My son and I standing in front of the future driveway entry point, again looking west:

We spent several hours in January flagging the proposed driveway location, using a compass and 300' tape measure. This was a lot of fun: taking bearings from a known (surveyed) point then and walking a certain distance in that direction - I was having flashbacks to my days in the Marine Corps. I am however ashamed to admit that despite my USMC training, our efforts the first day were wasted because I had forgotten to correctly set the compass' magnetic declination for our location, and we had to go back and do it again the next day. The county inspector approved the driveway location on the first try, so I guess we didn't do too badly in the end.

Last week the grading contractor was on-site doing the rough work on the driveway; he made a lot of progress I thought. This next picture was taken from the same viewing point as the above picture; big difference!

The driveway is pretty long at about ~300' feet, and has some gentle curves in it. Here it goes between two old cedar stumps left over the property's old logging days:

Next week we are scheduled to have a bunch of dump trucks come out and spread rock and gravel on our new driveway. After that the well driller will be coming out - there's no city water out here folks!