Weather delays

Last week, the second week of September, we got about 3 feet of snow. This is what the site looked like after day 1:

The snow continued for 2 more days. Before it started snowing, we were going to be backfilling on Tuesday. By Wednesday, we decided that we were going to need several days to let it all melt, and then dry up. We had puddles of water just outside the footings, so we didn't want to dump wet dirt on top of that. So the plan was to call the excavators back on Monday.

On Thursday, I stopped by the site to see how it was melting, and I found this:

The dirt pile in the middle of the photo used to be in the neighbour's yard. The black thing hanging under the fence is their landscaping cloth and mulch from their flower bed. And I'm pretty sure that concrete support for the fence post used to be surrounded by dirt. 

It turns out with the massive amounts of snow we got, and the quick melting, along with the fact that we had removed the shoring in the corners in preparation for backfilling, caused the dirt to give way. BIL doesn't think the shoring would have held it here. But a few hours later, another pile of dirt appeared at the other end of the hole. 

But because the excavator didn't want to backfill the whole side until our subfloor was on, the middle section of shoring was left up. And that's the silver lining here, because if the dirt had fallen in the middle, it would have taken their air conditioner down with it. So the shoring appears to have worked very well. 

So, the excavator came back on Friday afternoon. And they realize that because of the collapsing wall of dirt, we can't wait until the subfloor is on. But they weren't able to get to the side because they didn't have the right equipment. So, fingers crossed all weekend that it didn't get worse. 

In other news, we got the building permit for the house on Friday. But there's now a delay on the garage. Remember when the guy at the city told me a week ago that the garage was good to go as soon as we got the house designs completed? Apparently he hadn't noticed that our garage was a tad bit bigger than average. So now we need to have the concrete pad of the garage engineered. So now we wait on that. 

 Also on Friday, the inspector from the new home warranty program came by and gave us mostly thumbsup. There were comments about how they were "unable to inspect before the concrete was poured." Well, we barely caught it pre-pour, and we're there every day. They weren't planning to come by until the end of September, at which point they were planning to inspect framing, too. So, they're lucky to see it pre-backfill.