More concrete concerns... and some concerns about concrete

So, yes, as mentioned, we now have a building permit. Yay, right?

Well, not so fast. You see, in order to get that permit, I had to agree to raise the supporting beams flush with the floor joists. There's just no way we're willing to start cutting up the house, so I have to go back in and talk to the building inspector again, and explain that a) the final clearance after we put in the floor and ceiling will be less than the seven feet indicated on the plans, and b) we have absolutely no intention of moving or altering the structural supports.

We're hoping that if we just label the entire basement "storage" that they will let both height requirements slide. We're keeping our fingers crossed, but our hopes aren't exactly high, if you know what I mean.

In other developments, we had a guy out to try and clean our drain pipes. I say "try" because he really didn't get very far before telling us that he would need a more powerful machine.

Why, you ask?

Well, because of this:



That's one of the drain pipe segments he removed from the trench we dug at the rear of the house. According to him, it appears that the drains have never been cleaned.

Here's the trench after he got done pulling bits out and trying vainly to clean the muck out of the weeping tile:



Yeah, we had a LITTLE rain, but really not very much.

The other interesting thing we discovered was some strange holes in the footing of our foundation:



There are two of these holes, almost identical in size and appearance, and they seem to have wood embedded within them - bits of the original forms perhaps?

At any rate, it just means more work to fix them. Sigh. You'd think we'd be used to these little surprises by now...