March 22, 2021
With all the preliminaries out of the way, and the permits for the build obtained, the day finally arrived for work to begin. Our contractor – Casey Spurlock of Signature Homes Construction, LLC in Baldwin, GA – arrived with his foundation crew in the early morning. They had brought their digging equipment up in the late afternoon the day before. Work was to have started the previous day, but the water pump on Casey’s truck had shattered on the way up the mountain, and taken the radiator out. It took them all day to get the truck fixed, so the equipment got up to the site just before dark – too late to start work.
The first order of business was to get the propane tank moved away from the job site. It was brought around to the back of the house. Once it was in place, the crew rerouted the gas line under the house, and reconnected the stove.
With the site prep complete, it was time for the day’s main event. Tim Nabors of Superior Tree Service arrived to take out the two red oak trees that had to be removed. One of the goals of the project was to leave as many of the trees as possible. These two, unfortunately had to be taken out. The problem was that the trees were completely surrounded. On the down slope are two more large trees we wished to remain undisturbed. Just uphill is the power feed for our house. On one side is the house itself, and on the other side is the power feed coming in from across the lake, and continuing up Lakeside Drive to the other houses in the neighborhood. Because of all these obstructions it was impossible to simply drop the trees and cut them up on the ground. The obstructions and the steepness of the lake bank also made it impossible to bring a bucket truck in to top out the trees. The only option was to climb the trees and take off their crowns down to a level low enough to allow felling them without knocking out the power. This kind of work is Tim Nabor’s forte, as you can see in these videos.
NOTE – The date shown in the intros to these videos is incorrect. This work was done March 22nd.
Once the trees were removed, work could begin in earnest. The first step was to cut up the trunks of the trees that Tim felled, and clear out the limbs he had cut off. The crew were kind enough to move all of this wood around to the back side of the house where Sue and I spent the next couple of days cutting it up and splitting it for firewood.
Next, the crew dug out the tree stumps and began to dig out the floor for the basement of the addition. This work took the remainder of the day. There was a slight hiccup when they cut the water line coming into the house from the pump house. That took an hour or so to fix. By the time that got done, the day was spent.