The FACET (Facility for Advanced aCcelerator Experimental Tests) facility at SLAC has been under Construction since summer 2010. Its goal is to produce ultrashort and transversely small bunches of very high intensity (20kA peak current) to facilitate advanced acceleration experiments like PWFA and DLA. In June of 2011 the first electron beam was brought into the newly constructed bunch-compression chicane. Commissioning work included restarting the linac and damping ring, verifying hardware, establishing a good beam trajectory, verifying the optics of the chicane, commissioning diagnostic devices for transverse and longitudinal bunch size, and tuning up the beam size and bunch compression. Running a high-intensity beam through the linac without BNS damping and with large energy spread is a significant challenge. Optical aberrations as well as wakefields conspire to increase beam emittance and the bunch compression is quite sensitive to details of the beam energy and orbit, not unlike what will be encountered in a linear-collider final-focusing system. In this paper we outline the steps we took while commissioning as well as the challenges encountered and how they were overcome. Show Partial Abstract