A New Foundation

They have started construction on the house next door. As we were warned, it is noisy. The beeps and bangs start at a little after seven. John and I agree that we can handle most of the noise...even the pile driver-like pounding, but the back up beepers on the trucks hauling away rocks is hard to ignore....probably because it was designed that way, but still I liked the Japanese approach on buses which all had a young woman wearing a uniform and white gloves who would jump out of the bus when it had to back up and blow a whistle. 

We know this particular noise is probably fairly short lived. The owners have left town and we can't really blame them, since they are living in a trailer just out of frame on the lower right. They don't have double paned windows and doors which cut down considerably on the noise in our house, but we usually sleep with the windows and doors open. We are working on our strategy for closing them in the wee small hours before the trucks start beeping and banging. We speculate that they are probably digging into the rock for piers for the foundation. The sound of boulders dropping into dump trucks gets our attention, but I noticed that the latest wrinkle in dump trucks is a motorized cover that can be closed over the contents of the dump truck like a convertible top.  

It isn't idyllic, but we have been preparing for it for a year and we are pleased that our neighbors are finally starting construction on their home. the fact that we know them and have talked to them about it somehow makes the noise a lot easier to live with. 

I chose this picture because it gives a good idea of what a difficult building site they have. There is a diagonal line through the shot which delineates the property line between two lots...like two triangles put together to form a square. The lot they are currently working on drops off steeply just on the other side of the Deere digger. Part of the original foundation was actually built around the huge boulders that sit at the top of the cliff and stick out of  the cliff all the way to the street. The lot has beautiful views on all sides (except maybe of our house) but putting in a new foundation is going to be quite a challenge. 

The only other picture I took today was a new house at the corner of the Skyhawk development that lost 10 houses to the Glass fire. It looks like it will be the first to be finished. I'm adding it for Doingok because it looks a lot like the one they plan to move into when it is finished.