Game on.

A few glasses of wine prepared me for the 9pm meeting with Jim - the builder,  Turns out, it's not too bad... in fact, it's pretty good.  And that's not the wine talking (I think).  Perhaps it's optimism?

Well, regardless, Jim is a maniac - in a good way.  He's hardcore obsessive about building, knows everyone in the business and seriously works like crazy because he loves it.  He never stops talking so our meetings go FOREVER and he calls you every morning at the same time to give you an update.  In fact, Dave would probably say he'd like to talk to him less.  That's not normally the complaint you get when working with a builder!

Basically over the last week, Jim's been visiting contact after contact to work out the basement/foundation issues and find the most economical solution for us.  Seems as though he did it.  It shouldn't cost us much out of pocket, we hope.  So far, we had to pay a little to the engineers to do the plan for the foundation (which they already wrote out verbally, now it has to be drawn and warrantied for 30 years).   The rest we are hoping to minimize and hope to squeeze most of it out of what's already in our loan.  Deep breathe in..... and out.  Let's hope that's the case.

Jim's been to the city and looked in the records to find out that our fill isn't necessarily all from when they built 94, like we had thought.  It's mostly from DTE when they built and a lot if it's actually ashes from coal plants (so it drains well.. which turns out to be good for us).  Of course, that's mixed in with a lot of glass and bottles from prohibition years.  If you aren't familiar with the St. Clair Shores history with prohibition.. our house is on the bay where one of the biggest points of sneaky liquor deliveries came in.  I may actually go over to that dirt pile afterall and see if I can find a few bottles to save for keepsakes, considering that topic seems to keep coming up over and over.  By the way... did you know that in 1920's prohibition, Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River carried 75% of the liquor supplied to the United States?  I read about it and it sounds like a movie.. I can't believe all of that really happened.  Prohibition & the Purple Gang

I could detail out it out for you, since we went through a huge pile of estimates, comparisons, drawings and it was over an hour tonight.  I'm guessing you'd rather just know that it's good, that tomorrow there will be activity again.  A lot of the dirt should be gone, if the plan works out like we hope it to and the foundation will be starting to get situated.

So happy that at least we are moving forward again!