Hi guys,
Thanks for the positive comments. To answer some questions. Yes, that was the only flat part of my backyard, until we cut away the hillside. We had a nice surprise when we started the project, I did a survey to see my property line and it turns out my property is 20 feet behind that retaining wall, where you see the pool equipment pipes. The original plan was to go into the hillside 5 feet more, but we saved alot of digging by going straight back. That retaining wall is going to come down and my new fence line will be straight back 20 more feet, so it opened up a big area for us. Twolabs, yup a nice draining system and waterproofing materials are going to be installed. You guys got it right, no nosy nieghbors! The views are good, we are not that high up but have a free fireworks show every July 4th.
We almost had a scare during the digging, the diggers were claiming I was on bedrock, they couldn't dig, etc, etc. Mind you my access is narrow, so they barely got a bobcat in. So we had a meeting with my contractor, my dad who's a civil engineer was there and told the bobcat operator "just push your bobcats pedal down and dig!." Haha, he did it and broke thru. We had to soak the dirt a day or two but everything turned out great in the end and they ended up digging deeper than we had planned on so it worked out good!
We should supposedly be done in a month, I'll keep up on updating. Thanks guys!