I once was building a house in a corner lot carved from a farm field. Right where the basement was being excavated we hit a granite boulder about five feet down. We kept digging around it to get under it and it was almost as large as the basement. We tried blasting as we did for large boulders exposed in farm fields, but this one couldn't be. Every time they blasted it, we just shaved a few inches off the top, like a haircut. We moved the location of the foundation eventually. Otherwise we would have had a $200,000 rock and a $100,000 house.
I rented a house that the farmer’s grandfather had built. I mentioned the cool bench seat along the one side of the dining room wall that was built into the house.
“Yeah - there’s a big rock there. My grandfather hand dug this all - but he gave up on that rock. Put the bench in to cover it up!”
That’s facsinating. A few years ago I heard a contractor discussing ancient ruins he had examined. He said that the ancients lifted and precisely fitted mammoth stones that the very best 21st century cranes could not lift. Do you have any sense of the lifting capacity of modern cranes?
**** “Otherwise we would have had a $200,000 rock and a $100,000 house” *****
I would have made it a “Feature” and built a Hot Tub next to it.
Really