Highs and Lows

The sleep inducing machines of yesterday are gone, replaced by serious digging machines! Despite the rude awakening, this is good news. Or at least it was, until the engineer arrived and it seemed like one piece of bad news after another...

• The beam is not accurately placed on the plans, which means the window needs to be moved. Budget scale: 2/10
• The sous-oeuvres (no idea of the English word - it's the cement wall around the basement) will be needed, despite the rock. We'd basically expected this, so budget scale: 4/10
• The front wall is damaged (not sure why this wasn't spotted earlier... anyways). This is almost funny, because part of the reason for starting this project was that the home inspection (from before we bought the house) had noticed issues with the back wall, which have turned out to not be serious. Budget scale: 8/10

So, work is on hold for the next 2 days while JF is sharpening his pencil to see what this does to our budget. It's going to take a lot to dissuade Marc and I from pursing our renovations. Perhaps we'll  have to slow down the project time-line (just two weeks!) so our cash flow can handle it. Maybe there are some areas we can cut costs. Not sure of the options right now, so let's see what JF comes back with...

In the meantime, the digging team did make great progress today on the right (north) side of the basement which had been a big pile of earth yesterday.

BEFORE



AFTER