Site Work Begins...The Good Friday Surprise

While this project has been one twist and turn after another, we were hoping that once construction actually began it would finally be “full steam ahead.” However, only into the second day of earthwork we hit what we’ve come to call “Our Good Friday Surprise.”

We “unofficially” broke ground on the construction phase of the project on March 29th. First on site was the grading crew to remove a section of the commercial grade retaining wall left by an earlier owner but that we wished to build into our house plan. The concept seemed simple enough. We would pull out a small section of the wall (cinder block, filled with concrete and re-bar) and dig footers with a below-grade section of the Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) to follow. These would then link the garage – below the wall – to the crawl space at ground level.

The grading crew found that their equipment was little match for the wall. They ended up digging the desired section completely out and then cutting it before achieving success. That gave us a greater degree of confidence that the remainder of the wall, which would form the inside wall of our garage and be a support to a major section of the house, would actually stand the test of time.

Early Good Friday morning as the crew was digging its last section for footings, they uncovered what appeared to be a buried portion of the earlier home. Getting a call to meet your builder at the site because the grading crew has “uncovered a problem” is not the most pleasant of news for a planned day off.

Getting to the site, before builder Keith Rodgers arrived, I looked over the site several times with the crew. Finally, I asked Brian, the equipment operator to go ahead and dig a bit deeper. When he did we discovered several pieces of black plastic drain pipe – obviously something that hadn’t been a part of an early 19th century home. Thus, we learned that when the site had been filled previously, someone had deposited an unknown amount of construction waste and then conveniently covered it with about eighteen inches of dirt.

While waiting for Keith, I asked Randy Hensley, the grading company owner, what he thought the chances were that the waste was limited. He wisely surmised that we’d never know until they dug further. After turning this new challenge over in my mind a few times, I asked what he thought about just taking all of the dirt out and putting in a basement as opposed to stopping with a crawl space – there goes the financial meter spinning again!!

He allowed as how that’s what he’d probably do if he were in my shoes. At least then we’d know the extent of the problem and be assured that we’d gotten the footings on solid ground.

When Keith finally arrived, I shared the idea (at my cost of course) of just making lemonade out of the lemons and going with a basement. He too agreed that such was probably the best option given the unknowns.

Here we are in the first couple of days of plan execution and we’ve already made a major change – going from a simple crawl space with limited dirt to be moved, to a big shift with other issues to follow. Little did I know that such a simple decision would then lead to the dilemma of what to do with perhaps 350-400 cubic yards of now excess dirt. The Good Friday surprise was followed by a stressful Monday as we tried to find an economically viable option for moving the dirt. From a point where we’d first been concerned about having to haul additional fill into the site we now had dirt coming out our ears.

The saga continued. I had a client who needed the dirt on a site less than two miles from the project. However, their permit to store dirt on the site had expired and would take days or weeks to clarify. The gentleman who was going to haul the dirt for my client said he’d be happy to use it on his farm some 17 miles away. But, with that distance he’d only get 4 loads daily and thus we’d be hauling and keeping a crew on site for perhaps a week. Not an economic option.

A major interstate reconstruction project less than a quarter-mile away offered another option. Yet, when the “Dirt Superintendent” (big companies have lots of layers) explored our offering, he said there was too much debris in our dirt for his standards. Our dirt, while good, was just “too dirty” for his project.

Likewise, a remodeling project just three buildings up the street was in need of the dirt…in about two to six weeks. No help there.

A quick call to our partners at the City. The City of Greenville had a spot not three-hundred yards from our project where they desperately needed the dirt…yet a pending lawsuit between a neighboring owner and the SC Department of Transportation clouded our ability to cross the owner’s property for fear that such might negate the landowner’s claim or bring us – me and the City – into the lawsuit (just what I needed). By the time they did find a spot that we could take the dirt, some three miles away (good considering the 17 mile option), we decided to just do what we could to dig the foundation and store the dirt on site and see what we’d have to move later.

The stress subsided only to be re-stirred a bit later when we found that the amount of waste in the site was relatively small and that we could have likely done what we needed to for the crawl space fairly easily. But that’s hindsight. We now had an excavated basement and mounds of red dirt everywhere.

Off to such a great start!