Retaining Wall Song by the Rapper Girls

The Rapper Girls

Retaining Wall Song

verse

Prop it up, baby.

Prop it in the air.

Prop it up, baby.

Prop it everywhere!

chorus

Prop it up, baby.

Prop it up, baby.

Prop it up, baby.

Prop it up, baby.

repeat verse

We all possess a character flaw that can allow us to get so carried away with what we’re doing that we fail to notice when it’s time to quit. Driving a bull dozer and digging a basement can be like that. (I’ll bet you were wondering how I was going to tie in the home building angle.)

A land-mover was hired to bring his digging machine to a hilly construction site to dig the foundation and full basement. The hill had a gradual slope near the top, but further to the right it became very steep. (Remember that.) The house had been designed to sit near the apex which shallowed to a small plateau. The design called for the main floor to be about two feet above plateau level with some steps to the ground. (Remember that, too.) The rest of the main floor would extend out over the hillside and be supported by the basement.

During the pre-construction phase the owner or the owner’s friends or somebody or everybody decided that it was a bad idea to have any steps at all from the main floor to the ground. That could have been achieved by digging the basement a little deeper into the ground. Then, all those everybodys decided it would be easier to just slide the house down the hill enough to eliminate the steps. But everyone was concentrating so hard on the left end of the house, they never noticed what was happening on the other end.

Remember the part about the hill getting steeper on the right? While the left end was made closer to the ground by the site shift, the right end was suddenly stuck way out and way up in the air. Nobody likes to have their end stuck way out in the air…… well, maybe rapper girls, but they get paid to do that.

They didn’t know it, but the site shift had caused a situation that would require a retaining wall five feet high to hold up the basement. That extra cost alone would be a bad thing to deal with, but wait, it gets worse.

Once the site location was finalized, it was the land-movers turn to go to work. There’s no explanation for what happened next. Maybe he was thinking about his sweetheart or his Sunday School lesson, or maybe he was thinking about rapper girls who need retaining walls to hold their ends up. Whatever it was, it so fully occupied his thoughts that the point where he was supposed to stop digging was quietly passed. He made a full day of his task and dug all the way down to the bottom of the hill to make a pit twenty-seven feet deep. It looked a lot like those pictures of Mt. Saint Helens with the whole mountainside missing.

You can’t just fill the hole back up. The ground has to be compacted a few inches at a time by a careful and expensive process. Now, money intended for nice extras had just been sucked into the hill. The budget had to be recalculated to find enough money to finish the main structure, and nice extras were forgotten.

So what next? The builders (term loosely used) elected to build a huge retaining wall over fifteen feet high just to hold up the rapper girls basement’s end. And speaking of ends, this is one.