Excavation started today.  Right now we have a ditch on the site where our basement is going to go with more digging tomorrow to make room for our root cellar.  Then the foundation starts on Wednesday.

There were a couple of minor issues today, I guess the big crisis was one that I was totally not present for, but the dump truck that was hauling out our dirt broke down somewhere on Germantown Road.  Hopefully that doesn’t cause delays tomorrow.  The first little issue of the day that Dustin noticed was that the depth of our root cellar changed during the design, and while everything was drawn accurately to reflect that change, there were some depth markers on the elevations and sections that I totally didn’t update.  Somehow this made it past our engineer, and through the city without anyone picking it up and it was finally questioned on site this morning.  There was also a discussion about cisterns, which look likely too expensive for us to put in this late in the process.  Our contractor was thinking that as long as we are digging holes, we might as well dig one for rainwater harvesting large enough to get our garden through part of our summer.  This is something we had talked about a fair amount during design as a potential future retrofit.  It would be nice to get all that set up now, but it may be a little cost prohibitive at the moment.  We are already encountering some out of budget expenses with the survey on Friday and another visit by the surveyor tomorrow to site the foundation…  Something that is probably good to do because its a tight lot with little room for error, but is already costing a bit more than we would like.