Deal Off

I wasn't happy when we came back from England and the ditch still hadn't been dug. I knew that once it was dug and the culvert installed, I would once again have to get on the contractor's schedule. I called the city engineer to ask when they were going to dig the ditch.

"You're on the list."
"Okay, I assume I've been on the list for several weeks. Can you give me a better idea."
"All I can tell you is that you're on the list."

Well. Fine. I'm on the list. I'll bet my friend who never got anything more than little flags thrown in his yard was on the list, as well.

We would just have to come up with something else. I'd been trying to get a driveway put in since August and by this time it was nearing the end of November. Nothing was going right. The contractor was uncommunicative - I'd paid him to deal with the city yet I was having to do it. The city couldn't tell me when anything would be done. I had no confidence that anything would be done. Ever. And we were leaving for Florida in the middle of December.

In the end, we decided to get gravel. You don't need a permit to dump gravel into your yard. I asked the contractor to give me a price on rocking in the entire area behind the fence plus throw in a load of river rock to landscape inside the fence (something we'd been talking about for several years). And we could build a "bridge" out of wood to go over the swale. Not a permanent structure, completely movable and no permit required.

In the meantime, I wrote the city a letter telling them that I was withdrawing my agreement to pay for the culvert. While I was at their mercy on whether they chose to dig out the ditch, if they wanted to install a culvert, they would be doing so at their own expense. I handed it to the city engineer in person. He read it and just said "Okay". I think he was a bit peeved. I believe he was truly trying to be helpful - probably the only person in the whole scenario who was making any effort at all. But apparently he was powerless to overturn his own rules.

The contractor indicated that we could get all the rock for the same price as the concrete. I told him to give me a written quote and let me know when it could be done and we went off to Florida in the middle of December still waiting on the quote.