Every construction site has a story to tell, and sometimes the ground itself speaks the loudest. As we stripped away the topsoil on our lot, we started noticing odd, perfectly straight dark lines embedded deep in the earth. At first glance they looked like nothing more than stains in the clay, but digging further revealed something fascinating: scattered pieces of terracotta irrigation tile. These tiles weren’t modern utilities or abandoned pipes — they were part of a drainage system laid more than a century ago. Based on known history of the area, they likely date back to the late 1800s, […]

The heavy equipment has arrived, and the real digging has begun. In this photo, you can see the crew hard at work removing the poor-quality soils that testing revealed earlier this summer. Those layers of weak topsoil and saturated clay — some as deep as three feet — just aren’t strong enough to hold up a massive building. So before construction can move forward, they’ve got to go. Here, the excavator is loading up a Volvo hauler with bucket after bucket of the soft, unstable material. Every load carried out of the hole brings us one step closer to clean, […]