Today our builder’s crew worked at completing the form for the retaining wall footing. The footing is 3′ thick on the sides and 1 1/2′ thick in the middle. The rock slinger was used to place several truck loads of rock into the footing to raise the centre.

Tomorrow NBE will be paving the road so our builder will have little if any access. The rebar people were busy on Friday so they will come on Monday to install the rebar for the retaining wall footing. Next Tuesday is inspection day – both RDOS and the Structural Engineer will inspect the forms and the rebar. Next Wednesday our builder is planning to pour the concrete for the retaining wall footing. Hopefully the weather will cooperate by being warm enough to pour without expensive insulated tarps and heating.

Today our builder used the rock slinger to put down a layer of smaller rocks and then laid down the Geogrid and Geotextile fabric. It seems our builder was right in that the geotech ordered far too much material. Fortunately half of it will be unopened and hopefully we will be able to return it for a refund.

Once the fabric was in place, more rocks were fired into the hole using the rock slinger.

Our builder assured us that even though we needed to rent the machine, the amount of time and labour it would save would be worth it.

With another layer of rock in place, it looks like our builder is now starting to building the forms for the footing for the massive retaining wall that will be the west wall of the house.

All the good and bad soil has been removed and the Excavator that stayed much longer than it was invited for will be leaving – yeah. It was a rather expensive visitor.

The back portion of the boathouse has also been removed.

Today, the geo-grid material which came on a large transport truck that couldn’t get down North Beach Estates Road arrived. Fortunately our builder had a large enough pickup truck to move the huge rolls of material down to our property – they were 4m in length. Our builder believes that the Geo-tech ordered far too much material. He will discuss this with the Geo-tech when he returns on Tuesday.

After the geo-grid material is installed on Tuesday, our builder will bring in a rock slinger which we are renting from a different excavating company to move the rock from many dump truck loads into the hole.

After deciding that we needed to remove a lot more material than planned, the geo-tech has now decided that the soil is not strong enough and must be re-enforced with a bunch of Geogrid material. The material had to be purchased from a supplier in Abbotsford and rush-shipped up to the work site. (And we thought Amazon shipping was expensive.) Meanwhile, the excavation contractor keeps digging and trucking. Apparently they have moved 100 dump truck loads already and they are not done yet. We have purchased 35 Lock-Blocks to shore up the road – most are already installed. Once they finish digging down, they will then need to start filling the hole with new material. Oh yes, the geo-tech is taking Friday off and not much can get done without his blessing. The builder believes things should go smoother once we get the excavation done. (Let’s hope so, we have had enough surprises.)

Here is the hole at the road side.

Thanks to Sandra Broughton for the picture taken on Oct 4th

They started digging the hole for the house and discovered that, according to the Geo-tech, all the material down to the water table must be removed and replaced with new rock. This will cost significantly more in terms of money and time.

The excavation started at 8:00 am this morning. However, it was soon interrupted by the geo-tech determining that the footing was going to be below the water table. A quick discussion involving the structural engineer determined that the bottom of the footing would need to be raised by 18″. Fortunately the structural engineer found a way to raise the footing by the required amount but only raise the floor level by 6″. This now requires the drawings to be updated which will be done while the builder continues with construction.

Today’s work appears to be primarily focused on placing Lock-Blocks along the edge of the road so that the road will remain open while construction continues.

The RDOS confirmed that they are OK with the new site plan and the rest of the drawings as they are, so we can proceed with construction. Our builder is also OK with this. He has arranged for the surveyor to mark the house location on Wednesday and the excavator to come and dig the hole on Thursday. (Is it really going to happen this time?)

The biggest challenge will be digging the hole and providing support for the road so that it can remain open while the foundations are being built. Our builder is working with our geo-technical engineer to come up with the most effective solution.

The engineering firm who did all the permit drawings revised the site plan to move the house back on the property and removed the garage. A person in the RDOS planning department looked at the new site plan and thought it looked OK. However, it needs to be discussed with the Building Official who will be doing the inspections. Unfortunately, the Building Official was out of the office all day doing inspections. Hopefully he will be able to look at the new site plan soon and decide what other drawings need to be updated.

Last Friday we were told by our surveyor that the survey that they did in 2013 did not have the correct lake side property line. If we proceeded with building the house where it was shown on the site plan, we would be encroaching on crown land. The only quick solution is to move the house back on the property. However, this means that there will not be sufficient room for the garage. Given the choice between stopping everything and redesigning (including being in breach of our contract with our builder) or going ahead with a very compromised redevelopment, we have decided to proceed with having our structural engineer move the house on the site plan so that it will not be encroaching on crown land according to the new property boundary definition.

The irony is that today we were granted our RDOS building permit. We should be celebrating, but due to this latest glitch, the celebration is postponed once again!

To prepare for starting to build, we went up to the property and installed the orange safety fence.