Day 4

Day 4 of pool construction. Not much happening today - partly 'cos it's been raining for the last couple of days, and the hole is now full of muddy water, so all they did was empty it. Oh, and they brought some metal bars.



We got a 9 page document from Mr Carlos Pools, telling us what we are supposed to do and not do while they're building the pool. It might have been more helpful if we'd had this when we started, 'cos it says things like "The plans and inspection card willbe placed in a plastic envelope ... DO NOT MOVE, REMOVE or DISTURB ANY OF THE CONTENTS. Leave the envelope and its contents exactly where left." I mean, why would we do that?

"DO NOT ALLOW DOGS TO RUN LOOSE AFTER THE EXCAVATION OF THE POOL ...". Oops. I picked up the poop, so maybe they won't know.

"KEEP CHILDREN AND PETS AWAY FROM THE EXCAVATED POOL, ... PARTICULARLY THE EDGES." Well, as long as they don't watch the video. Anyway, no one fell in, so that's OK.

Today, which is day 5 of work, but day 8 since they started, they're putting the steel reinforcing bars in.

Neighbors, everybody needs good neighbors

There's a rule which applies in LA (County, or maybe city, or maybe California) about how far your pool can be from the boundary to your neighbors. If you want a 6 foot deep pool, you have to be 6 feet away. But if you want to have an 8 foot deep pool you need to be 8 feet away. It's not hard.
However, if you want to, you can get closer than this by getting permission from the neighbors, in writing. Our neighbor is about 107, has 24 hour care, and possibly never gets out of bed. (We've met a couple of the carers, one of whom was in her 70s. So we wrote a nice letter (recorded delivery) to the neighbor (I had to use propertyshark.com to find out her name) asking if she would mind if we built an 8 foot deep pool 5 feet from the boundary. The cool thing is, if you don't get a reply that says no within 30 days, you can take that as a yes. So we sat back and prepared to wait.
A letter came back, 4 days later - through the post, which I though curious, as the nearest mailbox is considerably further from her house than our mailbox (I'm trying to use American words here, and getting confused. What's the equivalent of a postbox, where you post the mail for the postpeople to pick it up? And what's the thing that we have outside our house that hte postpeople leave post in? Are they the same word? How do know if I mean postbox or letterbox if it is the same word). It said "I do object to ...."
Oh well, back to the drawing board ....