I've discovered that, much like a time exposure photograph, driving by our lot once a week is an excellent way to see how it evolves through the seasons.

With the green-up happening over the past couple of weeks, we got a clearer picture of how the area will look in full bloom.

Of course, we will lose many of the trees in the centre of the property to allow for the footprint of the house and room for construction vehicles to manoeuvre.

But, after taking our 100-ft. tape measure out this week and doing a rough staking of our setback, garage and house layout, I figured we would be able to save most of the trees towards the rear of the lot.

Good news for the neighbours to the northeast...

Our motivation for selecting this property was to create an urban oasis. We wanted to be able to look out our back windows and see nothing but forest, to be nestled in nature. And now that we have an exact breakdown of where the house will be located, we are satisfied that we will be able to achieve our dream.

Of course, if some overzealous dude in a Bobcat comes along and mows down all of the trees, we would be heartbroken.

That's why we're hiring a contractor to do the clearing when we are ready, to make sure only the trees that MUST be removed are taken down. We want to preserve as many of them as possible. It would be very cool to sit in the screen porch and hear the wind whistling through the branches and leaves just a few feet away.

YELLOW TAPE, RED TAPE

One person in the know suggested it would be wise to go out with some yellow caution tape and mark the trees that should be taken down, and to actually be there to supervise to make doubly sure.

But before we knock any trees down, we have to cut through some red tape.

The first step was to take two sets of our construction drawings down to the developers' offices for approval. I did that last week, and everything came through tickety-boo.

The developer keeps one set on hand so that when we finish construction in a few months, they can go back to the original plans and make sure we did what we said we were going to do.

We also had to pay a $1,000 design deposit, which is kind of like a damage deposit when renting. If we change our plans without consulting the developer, we lose some or all of our deposit.

I then moseyed down to the RM offices this week with three copies of our plans to apply for the ever-important building permit, and I was told we should see our approval by Tuesday or Wednesday.

That means we could actually start digging in the dirt by late next week!

Of course, one major decision remains before we get out the golden shovel for the glitzy ground-breaking ceremony -- choosing a builder.

We met with bachelor, I mean, finalist No. 1 on Wednesday night, and we should see the estimates from finalists two and three by the end of the long weekend.

We went with three quotes to weed out the high and low bidders. If one of them is outrageously high or low, we'll know it.

Plus, it puts more pressure on the finalists to "sharpen the pencil" when they are putting together their pricing structure for our estimate.

I'll get back to you on the results, and the audience voting, in the next column.