You walk out after a hard mountain rain and there it is. A fan of red mud across the driveway, a fresh gully cut into the slope, and a few inches of ground that used to be there simply gone. The mulch you spread in spring now sits at the bottom of the hill.
You bought a piece of land in the mountains, or you're building a home outside the city water line, and now someone tells you the septic system is going to be more involved than you expected. That is a very common conversation in Western North Carolina.
You step outside one morning, coffee in hand, and notice a crack running across your driveway that wasn't there last spring. Maybe it's a thin hairline line, or maybe it's wide enough to catch your shoe. You stand there wondering if you can patch it yourself, or if you're looking at a full pour.
You marked out the site. The equipment is ready. Everything looks straightforward until the slab starts cracking six months later and nobody can explain why. In most cases, the answer was decided long before the concrete was poured. It was decided when someone chose how deep to dig.
