Chris has been working this last week or so on:

• Front porch footings -- the excavator over-dug the foundation a little, so some of the porch footings are as deep as the house foundation, and some are at ground level -- so they're all on solid, untouched ground. When completed the porch will be about five feet above ground level. We've been kicking ourselves a little that we didn't plan a cold storage here originally. It's one of those things that seems so obvious in hindsight. I think the expense would have been about equal, but we would have had cold storage AND and more fill dirt AND less volume to fill. Oh well.

• Backfilling around the house -- so far we've been a little surprised how far the dirt is going. That is until:

• Settling the backfill -- holy snikeys but we have high clay content in our soil. Chris has a pipe which plunges into backfilled dirt. Just add water and presto-chango and all of a sudden there is 18 inches less dirt. Bummer. But much better now than later.
  

• Filling the garage -- Tim Holdaway drove his dump truck and dumped five or six loads of sand -- until his brakes went out. I think we're probably still about a load shy of full. The best part was Chris ran his skid-steer around back and brought up most of our collection of broken up concrete slabs and burried it in the garage fill. Unfortunately, there is still enough concrete set in the ground back there by the barn that it's probably best measured in fractions of an acre.
  

• Creating a road to the back of the property -- a ditch runs diagonally across our lot. Christ filled in enough for a road with dirt from the side of the silage pit.
  

Last year it would've been a tight race between the area covered in concrete and the area covered in puncture weed. I think I'm making headway on the goat-heads. While they've been working on the house I've been burning weeds. And the occasional accidental dry wooden structure. The good news is, you can only accidentally burn down something once.