Guest House Construction: Part 2

Moving "the tree"!

It's been months since "Part 1" of this series, and it isn't because I was too lazy to blog (although that is frequently true).  It's just that the last couple months have been nothing but paperwork and permits and waiting, and as riveting as I'm sure a blog post about that would have been I prefer to only post when I have pictures to accompany the progress.  We finally got our building permit from the city and county, basically the "go ahead" if you will.  The day that our builder picked up the permit he came by and staked out an area for the tractor guy to come scrape in preparation for forms. 

   
Basically it's just marking a giant square that needs to have the grass and topsoil scraped off so the pad can be built up in preparation for forms to be set.  Our backyard is pretty much a blank slate, but unfortunately there is one live oak that sits right in the middle of the garage that had to go.

Here's the tree in the way of progress.

 

The easist thing to do (and cheapest) would be to just cut it down.  I love trees though, and I plan to plant a bunch more when we start landscaping so cutting down a 10 year old live oak just seemed like a waste.  I looked around and finally found Wagner Tree Farm.  They agreed to do it but it turns out the first step is to call a service to have your utilities marked.  It's a free service, but is required for liability purposes before you can start digging giant holes in your yard.  They are supposed to come out within 48 hours of being called, but they didn't.  After waiting over the weekend we found out that they had actually marked the wrong address.  They came out Monday morning before I even got out of bed and marked all the utility lines.

 
This is what it looks like when they mark your underground lines.  There are flags and paint markings all over the front yard.  Yes, in our neighborhood all of the utilities are in the front of the house making the marking of the lines kind of pointless since our tree moving is all taking place in the back.  I get it though, it's a liability and safety issue so no big deal.

The first step is to pick the spot where the tree is going to go and cut out a big hole for it.  I have big plans for this yard (pool - golf green - playground- etc) so I wanted it to be safely out of the way.  We decided on the back right corner.

The tree spade (as it's called) is awsome.  It just slices out a perfect hole for the tree to sit in with ease. 

This is what it leaves.  The guy was a surgeon too because when he came back and put the tree in he even had the grooves lined up perfectly.

Next, he picked up the tree.  It's pretty much the same proceedure, but with a tree in the middle of the dirt that is being sliced out.  

Hardly any roots even got cut.  It turns out that trees this size don't have as big a root ball as I thought.  In a few years, you wouldn't be able to do this with this live oak, but I have high hopes it will survive this move.

He then gently and precisely set the tree in the hole he first dug and that was that.  The whole thing took probably 30 minutes and that was only because I was chatting him up the entire time.

Here's the tree in its new home.  We'll water it in every other day for a while to make sure it gets set and just hope it survives.  We have really good soil, so it should be ok, but this isn't the best time to move a tree in Texas.

This is what's left behind.  Normally, I would need to move that dirt into the hole, but I don't even have to bother with that since the tractor guy is going to come scrape all this area anyway.  

PROGRESS!