Work Continues & Then Stalls -- Week 3

Things were going well until we hit an unanticipated Pima County snag. Some changes had been made to the requirements for building in Diamond Bell Ranch that required more signatures from more offices than the builders had to get the year before. Of course, even though Vicki & Dave had been talking to the county for months in anticipation of the project, no one mentioned the changes to them.

Lest you think our builders were just trying to pull the thorns over our eyes, Trout and I met with a new CPA recently & he mentioned that Pima County is infamous for not informing people in advance of such changes. We were able to continue with the work up to a point & had to stop until the appropriate approvals were received.

Part of that process involved the submittal of this aerial photo which is more recent and closer than what you can get on Google. You can kind of see an area toward the east (right) that is pretty bare. That's where the house & shop are going.

This is our builder, Dave, with the grader checking the grade. This work was allowed to continue even though there were some issues about it.

One of the requirements of building down here is that you keep the dust down when grading. For this day, they brought in a "water buffalo." That's the white thing you see in the middle of the picture. They strung a long hose to the water main & used it to fill the buffalo from which they took the water to wet down the pad. The purple house in the background is our neighbor to the north. It's a great color.

The "no trespassing" signs were brought in this week.

This is a good shot of the most common color of green down here. I thought this bush was dead, but once the monsoons started, it greened right up. And you're right. There are no leaves on it.

This proves we won't go hungry if we do things right. Those are prickly pear fruits.