We knew that construction would begin in earnest when a pile driver with a towering boom maneuvered into the narrow lot next door followed by the off-loading of a trailer load of 40 or so poles piled across the lot’s front entrance. The only route by which the pile driver could exit the lot would be to remove the poles.

Which it did, one at a time, pounding them 30 to 40 feet into the soft earth, most of them below the ground’s surface, some of them within three feet of the side of our house. That’s as close as the law — the building code — allows, and the guy who is building this spec home is pushing the limits to get the maximum size structure on this lot because it will ultimately be priced by the square foot.

He bought the overgrown lot and the neglected house that stood there last August. The project started first in January but quickly ran afoul of the city code office which issued a stop work order because he demolished the neglected house without a permit. He spent from January until May negotiating a proposed $20,500 fine down to $5,500 and then getting plans for new construction approved.

No sooner had work finally resumed last month when they ran afoul of the neighbor on the other side over a property line. The neighbor returned from vacation to find that workers had relocated the property line some 10 to 15 inches to the new home’s advantage. The construction crew simply shaved off the offending edge of a sidewalk the neighbor had poured adjacent to his house years ago. He was at first apoplectic — how I enjoy an opportunity to use that word — but it didn’t last. The neighbor went from calling down the wrath of the code office and “my real estate lawyer” contacts to, “We got it worked out.” We wondered if money had changed hands.

The pile driver arrived the next day and began pounding pile then next.

To our surprise, it was not as bad as we had feared. Prior to the pounding, I scurried around the house, taking photos of every wall and every corner on the inside and every pier on the outside. I wanted to be able to document any cracks the shaking might create in sheetrock or between bricks. (In the process, I discovered a couple of cracks that I had not been previously aware of. Had I not seen them before the pounding, I might have misplaced blamed.)

With the pile driver crew came three guys with another company hired to monitor the vibrations from the pounding. One sat next to our house monitoring a device that I quickly dubbed a seismograph; another sat next to the neighbor’s house with a similar monitoring device. Their job, they carefully explained to us, was to measure the vibration from each blow and to quit pounding the pole if the blows registered on the Richter Scale. Or some such.

When they got to those poles close to our house, they quit early, leaving from three to six feet above the ground. They would cut them off level with the ground, a worker explained. Which they have since done. By last weekend, they had dug trenches about 18 inches deep connecting the piles and poured concrete into them. On Saturday, a hard-working skeleton crew of Yats had set the corners that will become the piers on which the home will rise.

And that’s the way things are on Laurel Street, where the huge crepe myrtle still stands in spite of abuse from the pile driver’s maneuvering and poles’ unloading. It has been slated for removal to open a drive entrance for the new home removal but a delay has allowed the old tree to burst into bouquets of soft pink blossoms for one last glorious time.