The surveyor mapped out the basement contours a couple of days ago to give the excavator a dig line; it is pretty much constant digging here now.  The front yard has large holes everywhere.

One thing we didn’t anticipate when planning on staying in the house was the difficulty of getting through the dig zone to the house on a daily basis.  Just look at the path we have to take.

Until they complete the new driveway (well, as complete as it is going to get with a layer of road base down) we are resigned to walking through dirt, and with the rains due in the next few days, mud.   The good news is that digging is going very fast, so probably only a couple more weeks of this.

We expected to find lots of rock in the soil, and we weren’t disappointed.

For those unfamiliar with the area and its architectural history, this is Santa Barbara sandstone, a highly prized building material.  While it is a pain to run into rock while digging, these rocks are going to give us plenty of material to do the decorative rock work on our house and our new rock walls, and would be rather expensive if we had to go out and buy them.

As an example, here is a nearby house with quite a bit of sandstone walls and decorative rock work on the house.