Wow! The promised bad weather finally hit us. Our tornado watch was upgraded to a tornado warning last night some time before 9 pm. There were some spectacular rains and some damage affecting the major roadways near our house.
Fortunately the folks working on our site were farsighted enough to put tarps over everything that needed it and anchored them securely so we had no problems at all.
We began the process of removing about 3 feet off of the driveway to prepare for the needed trench for the footer that will brace our major retaining wall by the side of the house.
Here is a kind of crappy picture, taken through a screened and somewhat dusty window, of the jackhammer in action (far right)
and the driveway (with tarp covering) is a wee bit narrower
especially when contrasted with how it looked at the beginning of this project
All that dirt had to go somewhere, so here are a couple of pictures to try to give you a sense of the size of the pile of dirt in our front yard. I characterize it as being about the size of a school bus.
Traffic has been slowing just to stare at it both in its tarped and untarped forms. I wonder how many of them are regretting not voting for reinstatement of the neighborhood covenants figuring that we’re going to do something monstrous.
Never fear fair neighbors. Much of that dirt will go back to supporting the driveway and much of the rest will modestly adjust the slope of the front yard. The rest, if any is left, *will* be hauled away.
One minor annoyance, the folks who were supposed to mark the utilities missed the coaxial cable supplying my internet connection. It managed to survive the jackhammering, but met its match when the mini-bulldozer attempted to remove the concrete pieces.
Apparently the last contractor who had worked on this driveway 1) poured a brand new driveway OVER the existing driveway and 2) embedded the cable (within some pvc piping) WITHIN the newly poured concrete. The first is a cardinal sin and whoever did that job should be standing in an unemployment line someplace. The second I’m told is also a terrible idea for exactly the reason that you have no choice but to wreck it when you work on the driveway.
The crew was so paranoid after that that they very carefully dug out the area by hand to ensure that nothing else had been missed.
To their credit (I can’t believe I’m about to compliment Comcast), the cable company had a rep out the next morning who reconnected service and gave us a generous amount of cable so that we could shift it around as we need to for the remainder of the project. Mind you, they still are charging me $49 for the visit because we cut the cable. I suppose they are just hoping that it will be too much bother for us to argue the point with them.
The pool walls are now up!
The usual shots
Now showing the filtration unit attached from the back end
And my favorite perspective. After seeing the hole in the back yard my mind was picturing the pool as being larger than it really was. Once the lanai is in place the pool will fit very nicely but, just like when you get that flat panel TV home from the store and in your room you always second guess yourself and think you maybe should have gone for the larger unit, I found myself thinking that we really should have gone for 50% more pool. Silly… but that’s just the way things are.
