The whole basement repair was bugging me so I did some research & didn't like what I was finding so I pulled the site boss aside last night & he confirmed what I suspected. The guy who wrote up the contract didn't include any waterproofing!!!! None!!! And the "piers" and "pilasters" I signed off on that he assured me would take care of the leakage won't do diddley for that. They'll keep the wall from caving in but they aren't going to stop it from leaking like a sieve.

Many irate phone calls later, the guy admitted to me that he COMPLETELY IGNORED everything I told him and just wrote it up according to the engineer's report (which only addressed the structural issue, not the leakage). And he was a complete ass about it too.

More irate phone calls moving up the chain later (including one to my lawyer to cover my a$$ and one to the state attorney general's consumer protection division in case I need a bigger bat to smack some heads) (and hanging up on a higher level sales manager who was an even bigger ass than the one who wrote the contract), I got hold of a higher level construction manager who listened politely, agreed that I'd been screwed, and took it to the president of the company.

Meanwhile, the site boss here and I had put our heads together to look for work arounds and guess what? They can't put piers on the front of the house anyway. The footer is literally sitting directly on solid bedrock. So instead of the 18 piers in the original quote, they can only do 3 (which should be finished this afternoon).

He & I went over options for controlling the leakage internally which would involve having to ahve the basement bathroom gutted in addition to everything else so I went ahead and got a rough guestimate from my general contractor for that.

AND... we talked about options for sealing the front wall from the outside (replacign the perimeter drain, sealing all the cracksin the wall individually AND then sealing the entire wall).

We both took those options to the higher level construction manager along with the situation about the piers and he's supposed to get back with me by noon with numbers (changes to the original proposal where they can no longer do the piers), estimate for external fix, and estimate for internal fix.

The site boss THINKS/hopes that everything should come out roughly a wash. That the money saved by not doing the piers might pay to have the sealing done.

We'll see.

(I'm afraid to take my blood pressure at this point. I've been so upset that I didn't sleep any last night & my stomach is killing me & I can actually HEAR my heart beating...)