[1]This past summer has seen amazing progress, both in our community, as well as on the site itself. Construction began in earnest in June of 2007, and has continued straight through the summer. Our open fields are now piles of dirt, we have a driveway (two, in fact!), and even have our retention ponds sculpted in and landscaped. The retention ponds went in early to help with water run off as much of the vegetation on the building areas has been removed.

This week sees much of the septic infrastructure going in, with large concrete fixtures being set into the ground that will connect all our various water handling systems together. Conduits are being run from the street to provide electrical, phone, and data services, and landscaping continues as the ever-present ledge is being pounded, scraped, and dynamited to fit out site needs.

It's a tremendous amount of work, and even though we're sad to see our idyllic fields and forest disturbed, we know we did our best to minimize the impact, and we're safe in the knowledge that had this been a traditional subdivide-and-build, the impact would have been far far worse.

We also have our first buildings on site! Okay, not really buildings, they're just construction trailers. But one of them is for our use, so we can hold meetings, have marketing materials, and store any items we'd like to have around. Since we can't really spend much time on the site while construction is going on, we won't be spending a ton of time there, but it's nice having a little slice of space we can use without fear of it being bulldozed over.