Gouged Wall

When the grading was done around the addition, which involved removing quite a lot of good Piedmont red clay, the Bobcat skid-steer loader operator did a nice job. But he did manage to gouge the back retaining wall along the rear property line:



It is one of the issues of which I informed Peter LaRoque of Mocksville, NC, the general contractor for the project, in my letter to him several weeks ago. When he was at the house recently to work on correcting problems that have cropped up or that were never addressed, he looked at the gouge.

"There's about a 4-inch root where those bricks have fallen out," he said, and left it at that.

But I'm left wondering: Does that mean his subcontractor didn't gouge the wall? Root or no root, the wall was intact until his guy missed his mark with the earthmoving equipment. Chalk this up to another disappointment from LaRoque Construction.