Building The Chirping Frog- Part 1

I have been dreaming about my own shop for years, but never really pinned down exactly what I wanted to do, until now.

Last week we closed on a piece of commercial property and have begun site work for our newest adventure:  The Chirping Frog, an antique, collectibles, vintage, home decor, furniture, artisan wares and more shopping mall in a great location right off a major interstate.  I also plan to host classes in a variety of fun topics; such as mosaic, hypertufa, jewelry making, paper arts, etc.  I am so excited and a little terrified all at the same time.

The property is a mess right now with concrete everywhere.  Now, I love concrete but ugh! this is a little much.  The footings and foundation walls you see in the above picture will be removed (that's about where the building will be) and we are planning to leave the retaining walls that surround the entire piece of property (two sides anyhow) for now.  Hoping to "play" in some way with them in the future.





The site work has begun, this is what our weekend looked like:

First things first, the crazy silt fence, roughly 500' of the stuff.  I dug quite a bit of it, thankfully the ground was fairly soft and made for easy digging.















Jason (my hubby) ran the mini-excavator while I was in the bobcat.  He started by clearing trees, drug them to the outskirts (its really muddy around the concrete area and the bobcat doesn't have tracks, I got stuck a few times as it was) and I piled them towards the back of the property.

After the trees were cleared we got started on the concrete.  I was dying to see that go.

Again, he broke it up and drug it out to drier ground and then I took it to the back of the property for now.  (Sounds like I'll be busting it up in the near future, that sounds like fun.... not!)

Sunday morning he worked a couple hours before church and after this is what I showed up to, chop, chop, time to get to work!

Here's a look at my tree pile (its roughly three times this size, it just keeps going).

This is my concrete pile.

Two walls down.  The wall wasn't attached to the footing and there was only two pieces of rebar running horizontally through the wall.  Not the correct way to do that BTW, but made for much easier removal.

Here is my "home away from home" for the next few months.  My "office" as hubby says.  

Still lots of prep work to do but we've made some progress.  Very exciting.