Champagne Problems; Building Rome in a day.

The birth of city planning?

As Bob Villa famously said "Rome wasn't built in day"... and with that I too would like to compare the self aggrandizing experience of home renovation with the planning and execution of of a city-state and cultural capital.  I always thought that phrase invited some exaggeratory comparisons but now... I'll gladlypoint out how the challenges of our lives approximate Romulus or Remus  - duh we have a dog already so this narrative writes itself.

wolf mother?

Now as Rome has always been fabled to have been built on a hill our house differs by having been built in a hole - the curiosity of the rear yard was always that it was about 3 feet higher than the first floor - you walked up to the front door and up again to the rear yard.  This combined all the function of first floor access with the light and airiness of basement living.  Always on the to-do list was the excavation of the rear yard to get it below the first floor.  Having wielded spade and pick in the past we were all too anxious to dig deep once again.... into our wallets for professional help (lol puns are critical to understanding the narrative of Rome).  So we found Jose and his crew to handle the digging and retaining of earths. 

All was looking great up to this point until the demands started coming for greater sums of the budget to be paid and claims of completeness were unverified.  And so we were forced to do what any disgruntled owner would do... and fire the help as passive aggressively as possible.

(via text message) 

A month or two of setback and a replacement mason had us back on track at about October of last year just in time for a very important event.