August 2021 Update - There's a Sign! (and a couple of couches??)

Molly Ishmael
Aug 15, 2021
5 min read

Updated: Feb 13, 2022

At the end of July, we were driving by the land and saw this sign! Apparently the builder had visited the site, yay! We didn't know they were going to install a sign so imagine our excitement when we drove by and saw it.

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A month has passed since the sign was installed and they haven't staked it out yet, so we're really looking forward to that. Seeing the marker stakes will make us feel like someday there will really be a house here!

This sign is on our property now, woo-hoo!

Staking out the site comprises of placing wooden stakes throughout the property to designate where the driveway and home site will be located. I honestly can't imagine how to even commence such a project. It's one thing to draw it on top of an image (which I did). It's another to superimpose a to-scale plan onto an aerial image (which the site designer did.) It's quite another to physically stand on the edge of a 20-acre lot and start measuring and marking and wading through bush and navigating trees and uneven ground and somehow bring a 2D rendering to life in the middle of the woods.

The process is pain-staking (see what I did there). First of all, our driveway is very long and it curves (we definitely didn't make anything too easy for whoever does the staking, haha.) Below is a photo of the dirt road leading to our land. I love the tree canopy above it. We are hoping our driveway will turn out looking something like this, too.

The dirt road leading to the land.

Not only must everything be carefully measured, but this process designates which trees have to be removed. I hate to remove any, but enough must be cleared to create a driveway and space around where the house will go. We can't have trees within a certain distance of the new home; not only would it be too difficult for the build process, but it wouldn't be safe. In the case of a windstorm or fire, for instance, trees should be at least their own height's distance from the roof. Of course, fires are not common here, but windstorms sure are!

This actually gets pretty complicated, because if there is a 50 foot tree, it must be located at least that same distance from the house or else it could fall and crush the house and anyone in it. According to multiple sources I read, an average tree weighs about a ton but oak trees can weigh twice that. I would be curious to know other people's experiences with large trees near the house. It sounds like what I would consider to be a large tree can weigh 3 or 4 tons, and even more if it's an oak. We definitely can't build a house too close to one of these monsters! We also don't want to cut down the largest and oldest trees - quite the opposite! I'd rather redo the plan and move the house site out of the way of the tree rather than vice versa. So, balancing all that makes the whole site planning process challenging.

Further, I've been learning that tree root systems typically grow 2-3x their spread but can even reach up to 5x their spread radius! Apparently in dry conditions, trees will stretch their roots further and further to try to reach water to stay alive. Whoa. In other words, if a giant live oak has a spread of 80 ft, the spread radius being 40 feet, that means above ground you only see the tree reaching 40 feet in each direction from the crown but the roots reach 80-120 feet and could possibly reach 200 feet each way! That's a 400 feet diameter root spread! Granted that size would be uncommon, but it is possible for a larger tree especially depending on what water conditions it has experienced. We definitely don't want to build a house in the path of one of those giants! A powerful tree can destroy a home's foundation, driveway, yard, you name it.

Don't worry, we would never cut down this tree! My husband was just playing around with his new machete for the photo op.

As I mentioned above, we're certainly not going to cut down trees willy nilly based on a drawing. Drawings can be changed; losing a historic hundred-year old tree, well, that would take a century to replace. Trees are very important to me and part of what we love about the land, so obviously, we don't want to accidentally plan our house right on top of the most special specimens. If there is a particularly large or old tree, we won't want it removed under any circumstances; the location of the house must change instead. This means that all the staking could be done only to be shifted later to accommodate a tree. This is tricky though, as we're building in the middle of the woods, and there are kind of trees everywhere... Hmmn.

One last note, did you know that there is a country fee per tree that is removed? We didn't either but now we do! I'm not sure if that's true everywhere, but it is here. Our county charges a fee to remove trees above a certain size. I assume this is to discourage folks from chopping down all these beauties and to preserve natural flora and fauna? I get it, as some of Florida live oaks are hundreds of years old, perhaps even thousands! It would be extremely sad to lose an ancient tree. So I'm 100% on board with keeping as many trees as possible, but obviously some of the younger trees will have to go and apparently we get to pay for the pleasure. That's a double whammy; we also have to pay for the labor of tree removal plus pay the county for the fact they were removed. However, this is beyond what we could do ourselves; it takes special equipment, so we don't have much of a choice.

For the reasons listed above, we'll have to be thoughtful and flexible with the house location, if we're going to avoid as many large trees as possible while safely clearing a site. One thing is for sure, we are excited to see this process get started!