Well… I thought I’d be able to share some good news about our build by now. Unfortunately things have not been going as planned. We headed out to our property at the end of June planning to stay for 2 weeks. Sam, our excavator, was on site within a day or so and started the excavation. He initially expected to take about 1 day to excavate before our contractor (Kim), could come and start working on the footings and start cribbing. It became apparent very quickly that the water we expected to encounter was more of an issue than anyone anticipated. The water came out just above ground level and since it was clay at that level, the banks kept sloughing causing everything above to collapse down. We were hoping that with the extrememly hot weather, the water might dry up, but this didn’t happen. Just before we left, Kim came out and they dug back enough to accomodate the garage, including the engineered wall and footings. Then Sam dug a large trench at the back to hopefully direct water away. We expected some sloughing, but hoped after some sloughing the bankd would stablize, allowing the main area to dry out and work to begin. At this point we were packing up to head home, so we were well behind where we hoped we’d be by now. Here is some photos of the build area throughout our stay.
The weather was very hot while we were out there, in fact here is is the forecast of the weather for the week after we left.
Since we have left things have continued to be problematic with the water and sloughing. Sam and Kim have decided to put in a large cement block retaining wall to see if they can control the sloughing and put in a geotech fabric with drainage rock to direct the water away from the building site. I hope that we can get this going soon!
Here are a few pictures to show how much soil was piled up from the excavation. This is only part of it, the rest was used to created an extended parking area up top or hauled down to the bottom of our property.
We are thinking we will be heading out for a quick trip around the middle of August to deliver the windows and doors and check on how things are going. Keep your fingers crossed for us!