A Hard Rock Story

Written by Jaqui Lividini

This week we went to the house to meet with Jeffrey, our Design Development Project Manager, and check on the ledge rock situation. A few weeks ago, you may remember, we established a plan to chip away at the rock with hammers and chisels in order to ensure level ground before laying the foundation. Unfortunately, this process is taking far longer than any of us could have anticipated and will take even longer to actually complete.

The good news is that Jeffrey found a machine that can remove the ledge rock in a much more expeditious fashion. The bad news? Said machine is the ultimate budget-buster with a $3,000 per day rental fee. Unfortunately, it’s uncertain whether it will take one day or ten days to remove all of the ledge rock—and we won’t really know until the process is underway. One thing is for sure—there’s a big difference between a $3,000 job and a $30,000 job!

Currently John and I are trying to decide if we should proceed with project “ledge rock removal” or not. It’s not a problem in the area of the garage bays, as those two areas are thankfully flat. It’s just everywhere else! Our contractor, who is trained to reach perfection on every project, would really like the entire bottom layer to be level, understandably so.

So it’s decision time yet again. We are leaning toward renting the machine for one day as an experiment to see how much ledge rock it can remove and then go from there. Fingers crossed it’s a whole lotta ledge rock!