Foundation excavation started

My wife and I drove out to take a look this afternoon after work. The debris piles are now gone, which is really cool - makes the space look a lot better. I was out there Tuesday morning before work, to help do a rough stakeout of the foundation outline on the site. I'm happy with the orientation and things are looking good IMO.

Here's a picture of the garage layout, looking west from the gravel driveway; the nearest four stakes form the garage outline:

(Sorry - not my best picture...the angle wasn't so good with the sun starting to set either.).

This will be a three-stall, 40' wide by 26' deep garage, which from the plans I thought would be simply huge, and is certainly larger than any other garage I've ever had. Seeing it staked out on the ground makes it look smaller for some reason. Walking around the staked-out outline of the rest of the first story causes similar feelings.... :)

Same garage outline, looking more northwards; I'm standing roughly in the pantry, or maybe the living room:

The only thing I didn't really like is the size of the cleared area...both my wife and I thought that the front of the house is going to be a bit close (30-40' or so) to the tree line. The project is on a budget though and this is the best we can do for now.

I'll share more details about the floor plan layout in a later post, but don't expect anything grandiose - briefly, we're building a large, colonial-style, four-bedroom, two story house, with master bedroom on the ground-floor, along with two ground-floor offices (for my wife and I). The other bedrooms are upstairs, along with a second laundry room (our kids will be expected do their own laundry after we move in....my wife is looking forward to this :)).