Filling the foundation

We had a visit from the city's building inspector. We're told he thought that everything looked good, except he didn't think any of the dirt we'd dug out was usable as fill material- apparently the cit's had three garages washed out in the last year due to poor fill material underneath them, so they're cracking down on fill material. This means we needed to truck out that huge dirt pile and truck in a bunch of gravel and high-quality dry, compactable soil. Thus, more cost (trucking and dumping are not cheap) and more delay. The silver lining is that our house will be that much more secure with good quality fill underpinning it.

The other complication we're hitting is that we need to get an excavator behind the house to fill in the trenches between the house and the retaining walls, but with the clearing limits so close to the house and the steepness of the slopes, they're not sure they'll be able to fit it. Their options are basically to take the excavator along the rim of the slope by the garage:

From Filling the foundation

or up this slope here (without touching the plants):

From Filling the foundation

If they can't figure something out, those trenches may not be filled until next year, after the construction is completed. I'm not sure why they didn't think of this earlier.

One way or another, the foundation should be mostly done soon, and framing is still planned to start next week. Apparently we're going to start framing before the concrete floor is poured, which the foundation guy thinks is going to make things more complicated, but apparently they've got a framing crew basically sitting idle because of the delays we've been hitting, so they want to get moving.