When we build a house we like to use painful past experience to guide current practice. Except for those times when we don’t. Once unleashed, the inertia of the permitted, surveyed, excavated, engineered and pre ordered project is pretty hard to unwind. In that scenario it is often best to throw the money at the problem to make it go away permanently than to try half assed manoeuvres to defer the problem to a later date. The strategy to defer, delay and procrastinate will only snowball the problem making later fixes worse, more costly and more awful to deal with. The art is to know what do, who to call, how much to pay and precisely what the prescription is to leverage the most pain relief. This is the pulling off the bandaid approach to construction. When basement building, the key is depth of cut and grading. The situation faced was overly deep excavation created by pushing the building too deep in the ground to make the roof peak fit. The consequence was the top of wall being too low, and the sides of the excavated hole being unsafe, and the basement slab being so deep it can’t gravity drain. The solution was over height forms (large $), Shotcrete shoring for safety (large $), and lift station for the basement fixtures (large $). All this makes the builder toss an extra $15k into the hole. That hurts the budget vs a comparable home built by a smarter builder that would look identical but avoid $15k in unwanted expenditure. In our defence, none of this background fiasco slowed the project, decisions were made and the remedy work expedited in advance of when it was necessary. And nobody was at risk of being injured at the job site. Relearned lessons and more painful experience for the builder on basement building.