Delays. . .

...Are part of the game on almost any building project.  We've encountered ours at the beginning. 

While the empty-out and tear-down went flawlessly and perfectly on-time, one of our main contractors for the first part of construction informed us only days before we were supposed to start moving dirt that due to a serious illness in his family he had to withdraw from the project.  Unfortunately for us he was probably the hardest of all the contractors to replace.  I fully understood his concerns, if he was to start the job and not be able to finish that would leave us in a more difficult position than if he hadn't started it at all.  He's a great guy and would not have begged off had it not been absolutely necessary.

So, after a few days of scrambling we were able to find another company to do the job.  They are also a local operation but quite a bit bigger.  They do most of the big commercial poured concrete walls in the area.  They, of course, had some commitments they had to wrap up before starting our job and then the cold weather came, necessitating another temporary delay. Work clearing the hillside happened on Wednesday and the site is pretty much cleaned up and ready for digging.

What does all this mean to the completion date of our job?  Not much.  We had time built into the schedule for weather-related delays since we always intended to start in winter.  We have plenty of time to get this done.  Weather permitting I expect digging to start in earnest this coming week and with any luck we'll have a retaining wall up in a couple of weeks. 

Does this mean I'll be working every Saturday and Sunday from June through August?  It's too soon to tell but you lose time on jobs and then gain some back at various stages and that's a normal part of the process.  If things become too compressed when we get to the summer then we have people we can call to help us out and the resources to pay them if that becomes necessary.  We will meet our completion date without question.