Wednesday Morning, 7AM

NOTE: As of September 23, 2009, this post has been edited in
accordance with a court-mediated settlement. The names of the
contractor and his excavation subcontractor have been replaced with
pseudonyms.

Poor John has to put up with a lot:

Not only do the machines wake him up in the morning, they operate just outside the window by his desk. He's been a real trooper.

When I got back home, I found most of the old foundations under the back of the house were completely gone. The bobcat was stranded in a big hole:

Contractor A (the one who would later say he was unable to notify us in writing about the conditions under our house because he was working around the clock to keep the site safe) and his team were just packing up for the night. He explained to me that there is so much water in the soil that they have to dig holes larger than they originally expected, just so that the slump at the edges wouldn't impede their work. That also meant building a pretty significant retaining wall for the side of the hole that was closest to our neighbors' house:

HOLY GOD, PEOPLE.

They had hoped to be completely done removing the old foundations over the weekend. The amount water in the ground has put the kibosh on that idea, though, meaning that the machines will be at our house again tomorrow and perhaps Friday, too.

"I don't even want to think about money," Contractor A (the guy who would later claim the reason he walked off the job was that we had not paid him) told me. However, thinking about money is exactly what we need to do -- sooner than later. It was against Contractor A's own best judgment (which was clearly not the finest and sharpest judgment available, you must admit) that he started this job during the rainy months; we're now dealing with the consequences of that decision. I'll be very upset if we end up shouldering the entire burden, financially speaking. (And yet, eventually, he would end up paying nothing, though his insurance company would pay a small amount and we would end up having to modify this site to sooth his petty little ego.)

posted by noel on 02/23/05