Permits! Digging!

We have got permits for a pool (apparently - I haven't seen them, but I believe them when they tell me we have). They will come on Friday (that's a week today) and start digging. Digging should take two days - they might finish on Saturday, if we're nice to them, or might finish on Monday.

We want to use some of the soil to try to make parts of the yard less steep - but there is quite a lot of stuff in the way. Some paving stones, the compost heap, a weird bench thing (made of three pieces of stone - it's very, very heavy, and falls over and apart when I try to put it together). I wonder if we can just bury it.

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 ....

We've commissioned Mr Carlos Pools

We've spent months since we moved in agonizing and thinking and having people over and then agonizing and then thinking some more about getting a swimming pool . On Sunday we finally bit the bullet, and got Steve, from Mr Carlos pools, around for the third time, and made him measure and think and draw plans and calculate and measure again, and so on. Steve seemed to know what he was talking about more than some of the other designers we had, didn't suggest that we needed a landscape designer (that made S really cross) and also was amongst the cheapest.

Then we signed a contract to build a pool in our back yard.

But there's a weird Los Angeles (or maybe California, or somewhere anyway) that if you want a pool that's seven feet deep, you have to be seven feet from the neighbors. Unless you get permission from the neighbors, in writing. Trouble is our neighbor is about 107 and bedridden, and we've never seen, let alone spoken to her. (We know she exists, because an ambulance turns up once in a while, with red flashing lights, to revive her; or something). Anyway, you don't have to get permission if you write them a letter (recorded delivery) and they don't respond within 30 days. And we think that her responding is pretty unlikely.

So the nice people at Mr Carlos and Associates (weird name for a company - but apparently it was started in the 1950s, and Mr Carlos is still about) said that they would send me a letter as an example of what to write to her. Except they don't have a scanner, and I don't have a fax. So they copied it and posted it. Except they were too moronic to notice that the photocopy (which was of a fax) was so poor that they might as well have sent a blank piece of paper.

So, in our usual fashion of finding highly skilled tradespeople, we expect people who can't read (it appears) to be able to build a swimming pool made of steel and concrete and electricity and chemicals. (And water, I suppose.)

But maybe it's different people. We'll see.

Picture at the top shows the letter they sent on the bottom, with a random letter that I had lying around (it's actually about driving in Mexico). The letter they sent really is the right way up.