Excavation

Well, after taking months to get through permit - things are progressing at a break neck speed for the time being. Same crew that demo'd were out today to start excavating - and as hard as it is to believe - they will wrap up tomorrow!

It is amazing to see them work on such narrow city lots - literally digging within 9 ft of the neighbors house.

The "free" dirt dump site Bridget found out about via a friend worked out well - and given 50+ loads left the site - we saved $70 per load (so 50 loads x $70 each - works out to $3,500 savings). Now, we may not realize all that, as I think they probably spent a extra 20 minutes getting to that site - but either way - we should save some $$$.

So, plan is excavators will finish up tomorrow and the concrete folks will be out early Thursday to start the footings - in fact, they have already called for a Thursday inspection - so they plan to be done in a day as well.

All in all, progressing much faster than I could have imagined, considering I was worried we would not even get out of permit phase less than 7 days ago.





By mid morning the whole was already very deep...

While this kind of teardown is done in nearly every suburb in Chicago, and has been for years - it is certainly a nuisance to others though - as the crane was probably 6 feet from the neighbors the entire day. The house across the street from us (1125 webster) had been on the market as a teardown - but was recently taken off the market and rented out due to the soft market - but its only a matter of time before we get our share of the nusaince.