Progress Amid Setbacks

Disappointingly, the sparsity of my posts are an indication of our recent progress. November was slooowwwwww, painfully slow. After the bulk of the excavation, the concrete subcontractor came into to dig, form, and pour the footers. These were hand dug and led to an unpleasant discovery of more bottles. Yes, those lovely antique bottles we were so thrilled to discover are now a gigantic pain in our collective ass.

As you can see in the pictures below, "piers" were dug as needed along the north wall footprint. Basically, the workers would just keeping digging until they found solid ground every time they dug into a patch of the bottles. In reality, it was more than just bottles. It was a layer approximately 6-8 feet deep of bad soil comprised of bottles and what appeared to be ash from burnt trash.

Here's a corner pier that goes down at least 4 feet.

Numerous holes along the north wall.

We thought that digging down to solid ground where necessary would be adequate, but the soil engineer and the city inspector both disagreed. So we were back to excavation. In short, this required emptying seven large dumpsters of bad dirt, cost us at least two weeks, and increased our costs by almost $13k. Yes, $13k, that 'k' is not a typo. This cost us a lot of nice-to-haves, but it's hard to be too upset since you have to have a solid foundation. Let this be a forewarning to anyone considering a build - unknowns can be expensive!

To boot, the weather hasn't cooperated either. It has not rained much, maybe once every 8-10 days, but it always rains right before a scheduled job. So we have large unexpected costs, we're behind schedule by weeks, and we've had 3+ weather delays. While I'm not surprised, this is just too much of cliche for me. Hopefully, our bad luck is being front loaded!

Just last week, things picked up and the basement walls were poured. We're almost out of the ground, but it is still slow going.

The remediation in progress...dig it all out and put in new dirt.

Footers, finally!

Basement wall forms going up

We have walls!