Thursday, March 18, 2010

Concrete

After a lot of waiting for rain to stop, the concrete has finally been poured.  The concrete people took one day to prepare the ground for concreting, then we had to wait for an inspector to come and inspect the earth (ground) on the rails, and then they could return to concrete.

Joe (from JDC Concrete) was very efficient.  We decided to have some steps made at the same time as they were here, and we changed our minds about where the concrete should end about 5 times.  After they'd prepared everything for concreting, we changed our minds again, and they rearranged things in the morning without complaining about it.

What's that? You want some photos?  OK.

This is the pool area prepared to be concreted:
Sw

They are finishing off the concrete here, and it's still wet, hence it's dark:

Pool after concrete

The concrete still isn't quite dry. They put bubble wrap to protect the coping around the pool while they concreted - they will come back and pull the last bits out, and fill the gap with mastic.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Pool Door Alarms

Today the inspector was due to give the final inspection before the pool can be completed (I think there's another inspection after the pool is completed) when they checked the gates, fence and doors.  The gates and fence around the yard have to be 5 feet high (I knew about that, we were fine) and the gap under the gate has to be less than 4 inches (I didn't know that one, but we scraped through at 3 15/16ths).   All doors from the house to the yard have to have door alarms - these are possibly the most irritating things I've ever known.

After you open a door, you have 7 seconds to press the button on the alarm (which has to be high enough off the ground that kids can't reach it).  You then have about 15 seconds to get out of the door and close it.  If you don't close it, the alarm will go off - even if you continually press the button.  You can never leave the door open - you would need to employ someone to press the button, wait 20 seconds, close the door, open it again, press the button, wait 20 seconds, etc.  (Several people I've described this to are convinced I've got it wrong, because it sounds so insane.)

The alarm is designed very cleverly to be hard to disable.  As soon as you detach it from the door, it's going to go off every 15 seconds or so, until you can get the battery out.  And you can't get the battery out without removing it from the door and then undoing four screws.  And you can't get it back on the door without a battery (that's kind of clever, in an irritating way). 

The dogs are always a bit hesitant to leave the comforts of the house for the yard.  (Well, they're a bit hesitant to do anything).  So to get the dogs into the yard, I need to get them to the door - this is a challenge, because by the time the second dog has arrived at the door, the first dog has got bored and wandered off.  Then I open the door and try to get them out, but they've only got 20 seconds before the alarm goes off, which frightens them and makes them run back into the house. And I usually can't get then both through the door in that time, so getting the dogs out of the house is close to impossible.

But a door alarm might be useful. I can see that there are times when I might want a door alarm - like if we've got visitors with kiddies.  However, the rules about door alarms make them so irritating that as soon as the inspector has done the final inspection, they are removed.  But because the rules insist that a door alarm is absolutely 100% effective (well, maybe 99%) , it makes it so that no one uses it at all.  It's like those paracetamol (acetaminophen) that had Acetylcysteine (a treatment for paracetamol overdose) in them, but they cost more, so no one bought them.  Because, either you're not planning to OD on paracetamol, in which case why pay more? Or you are planning to, in which case, why pay more?

But I have a cunning ploy.  I've ordered two switches from Amazon for 99 cents each (plus $4.50 p&p), which I'll attach to the alarms, so I can detach the battery without dismantling them, and will, in theory, have the best of both worlds.  But we'll see.  Check back later.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Our first avocado harvest

The avocado tree in the yard has had avocados on it for quite some time, which looked ready to pick. I thought I'd wait for one to fall off, and that would be the sign that they were ripe - but I waited and waited and they didn't fall. And the tree started to make flowers for the next batch of avocados, so I thought I'd waited long enough, and decided to pick them.
The second problem is that it's quite a big tree and I couldn't reach them. So a bought a fruit picker from Amazon and plucked them down. They are still fairly hard, and some of them are small. But avocado feast here we come!
(The tree gets watered by the grey water system, so I expect buckets full next year.)