Cabin Site Preparation - Establishing the Footprint

My grandfather passed away and we attended the funeral yesterday.  Today, I took some time to be alone out at the property.  I sat around and enjoyed the day some and then worked on establishing the footprint for our cabin.

As previously indicated, the cabin my parents are providing is 16' wide by 32' deep.  Along the front side, there is a porch which is 16' wide by 6' deep.  The cabin will face in an east/west orientation for a couple of reasons:

  1) This allows us to sit on the porch and admire the view of our land.

  2) The east/west orientation minimizes sun exposure to the cabin as best possible.

Today we visited the land with a few wood posts and some string to determine a good location for the cabin.We laid out the corner post as best possible without going through all the effort to get it perfectly square.  At this point, we were mainly looking for a good general location and to see how the cabin would line up with the trees on the property.  

The following is a little difficult to see but this is viewing the proposed location from the front of the cabin.  The two posts up front are 16' apart and you can see the back two corner posts in the background.  We really want to keep the pine on the left side of the picture.  Unfortunately, this means the cedar elm on the right side will need to be removed.

The land has much more slope to it than I expected.  With the string six inches off the ground at the back, the front is 31" off the ground.  I'd like to find a way to change the grade of the land some to minimize this a little.  The cabin has 4"x4" skids and then the floor so 31" is just to the bottom of that structure which means the floor would be more like 40" off the ground

At the back of the cabin location is a group of tree trees which have had their roots all grow together.   The cabin is somewhat centered between the road which comes into the property and the cluster of trees.  There is about five foot between the front of the cabin and the road.  At the back, there is two or three foot between the cabin and the trees.

The largest of the trees at the back is rotten through the middle and needs to be removed.  I intend to remove them all including the cedar elm on the right in the picture above.  I'm not quite sure how I will remove the stumps.  If I need to leave much of them in the ground, leaving the cabin about 2-3' away will help a little as the ground shifts from the decaying roots.  

When I remove the trees, I'm going to leave a decent sized stump which can be get it out of the ground.  I'm not sure if I will dig around them and cut the roots with a chainsaw, burn them, or what but I'd really prefer them out of the ground.  Leaving them there would just be asking for problems with the cabin foundation later.  

To finish out the day, I used an axe to remove the tree on the left side of the proposed cabin footprint.  The tree was about six inches in diameter so the job was not difficult.  Surprisingly, the tree had about 40 growth rings so it has been there much longer than I expected.