A visit from Murphy

According to Wikipedia:

Murphy's law is an adage in Western culture that broadly states, "if anything can go wrong, it will."

I like this one: "If there's more than one possible outcome of a job or task, and one of those outcomes will result in disaster or an undesirable consequence, then somebody will do it that way"

Here are others: "Anything that can go wrong, will," the similar "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong," or, "Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way." In a less dramatic fashion, the law can be expressed as "Anything that has a probability of happening greater than 0 can and will happen. No exceptions."

So basically, that summarizes the weekend. Well, not really, we did get a lot done, but things weren't the way we had planned.

It all started well and happy on Friday. Shawn and Brian worked on installing the french drain system for the eave spouts, while Pam and Derald raked leaves and cleaned the area so that rock could be dumped in. Brian left, and Shawn, Derald and Pam began to fill in around the garage with pea gravel.

Saturday morning Shawn, Derald and I worked on building up a ramp so that we could get the skid loader in the garage to fill in more pea gravel. The weatherman predicted maybe a dusting of snow during the day, and this is where Murphy's law began it's day long campaign. Instead of a dusting, we got 3" of snow. I think this was God saying: I don't think you should be working on this today, but we didn't listen, so we worked through the snow. The top 6" of dirt were frozen, but underneath it, the dirt pile was a gooey mess of clay. Great for pottery, not so great for backfilling.

While Shawn carried loads of dirt with the skid loader, Derald and I shoveled dirt around to give the ramp shape. So after about four hours of work, the ramp was ready, or so we thought. The clay was just too wet so trying to get the skid loader up the ramp was like trying to climb a mountain made of soft butter. The dirt would just slide around and the tractor would just sink in. Again, I can picture the All Mighty shaking his head at us.

We were at least wise enough (credit Derald here) to decide not to go over the ramp into the garage, because we feared we might not get the skid loader out. Here's a picture of the ramp that we took yesterday (we couldn't find the camera on Saturday. Cari, Brian's wife, took pictures with her camera, so I'll post those when I get them from her).


The other thing that we needed to do was to compact the soil as we backfill so that it won't settle as much. Well, that went about as good as trying to give a cat a bath. The clay was so sticky that trying to push the compactor was like trying to push an 800 lb gorilla that was glued to the ground. Another victory for Murphy. Actually, I think God was rolling his eyes at us at this point and mumbling about children who don't listen.

We very quickly gave up the idea of compacting, and instead used a hand tamper to pound in a few places so that we can at least feel good and say we compacted.

To get the footings covered with pea gravel inside the garage, Shawn went around the outside, got close enough to the wall and dumped the gravel inside next to the wall, then we had to hand shovel it into place. Brian arrived and continued to work on the french drain, while the rest of us built some muscles with the shovels.

In the afternoon, we filled in two feet of pea gravel around the front of the house, under the window wells, and almost all the way to the back. We couldn't finish because we still needed to hook up the footing drains to a pipe so it would drain away from the house.
We laid the filter fabric on the rock we had placed and called it good for the day and made plans of all the work we would do on Sunday.

Shawn took the skid loader to load up the 800 lb gorrilla (the compactor) so he could put it on the truck to take back on Monday. The rear right tire of the skid loader looked low all day, and we should have pumped it with air, but didn't. Here's where God said: that's it, you guys aren't paying attention! And with a nice hiss the tire went flat. And there went the plans for any more work on backfilling on Sunday.

Despite all of the progress, it was hard not to feel sort of disapointed. Pam finally said that it was God's way of saying it's time to quit now, or else. We all quickly agreed (We give credit to God for the turn of events, and Murphy can't have the satisfaction of defeat!).

Sunday morning without the pressure of having to be out there doing something (well, stuff still needed to get done, but without a skid loader we were at an impasse). So instead we enjoyed a leisure breakfast and visited with the grandparents. Shawn and Derald did go out to the basement to seal the floor drain so that water won't get in there and burst the pipes when it freezes, and we will be adding antifreeze as a precaution just in case. Pam and Derald left around 11 am, and Shawn, Evan and I played in the snow (Evan calls it nows). Here's a picture of Shawn giving Evan a sled ride. We also made snowballs, and played inside the basement. Here's what it looked like with a nice blanket of snow on Sunday morning.



During Evan's afternoon nap, Shawn and I worked on getting the caulking and taping of the waterproofing finished (Finally!). We also hooked up the drain pipe for the footings. By 1 pm all of the snow was gone. Here's a picture of me working on the caulking. You can also see the french drain that Shawn and Brian installed. The pieces of pipe going up will eventually hook up to the eavespouts from the roof gutters. The system is intended to keep rain water from pooling against the basement and minimize potential damage.

Today, we decided that since the clay is too hard to work with, we will order 4 more truckloads of pea gravel and backfill with that all the way to the top.

The rental company fixed the tire this morning, so Shawn is taking the rest of today, tomorrow and wednesday off to finish the backfill work.
His boss gave us a tip to put hay or straw on the ramp so that we can drive over it. We'll see where we get a bail of hay for that.

Weather outlook is great for the next ten days. We are delayed now, since the stoop will probably not be poured until Monday, but we'll continue to make progress and take it one day at a time.

But who knows, things are turning out this way for the better. My mum says that God always walks ahead of us. So we will just trust in him that he's the GC for this project and we will do things his way. By the way mum, did you happen to slip and forgot to pray for the snow to stay away? We were wondering about that.