What Lies Beneath...

What Lies Beneath...
Friday 12 December 2008

You know, when we bought our house the bank that owned it had disclosures to make… Disclosures they wouldn’t disclose until we had put down earnest money and signed agreements. We had the right to back out, but we were pretty far in. James and I had lots of fun speculating what they would disclose… Radioactive dumping ground? Horrific murder? Grave yard under the palm trees? Happy or not-so-happy haunts? When the time came for disclosures we were pretty disappointed. Lead Paint. Possibly. It was a very boring disclosure considering we had already signed an acknowledgment that lead paint was still in use circa 1978 when our house was first painted. Disclosures are all well and good… Discoveries are another thing…

So anyway, once the jungle in our backyard was leveled (sorry, environmentalists!) we notice anew how rocky our lawn is… Not real rocks, mind you… Chunks of concrete. And we also notice that we have Florida’s only hill in our backyard. Never content with the million and a half projects we have going inside, James decides to tackle this nemesis once and for all. Armed with a shovel he walks outside, trips over a piece of concrete, and starts digging. And digging. And digging. When he calls me out later to view his project, I’m aghast! What do I say? A fairly decently normal looking lawn has turned into a war zone. It looks like bombs have been dropped. Lots of concrete is gone, sure… But lots of “grass” is gone too. (I say “grass” because it’s more weeds than grass.) And though my rational mind knows this excavation is necessary and beneficial, my less rational mind is saying, “Oh great. What now?” James has unearthed (besides all the smaller pieces already tossed over the fence) three large slabs of concrete. They are completely unmovable because 1) they are too heavy 2) they are still partially buried. And we wonder to ourselves… What in the world??? So James moves on to the ‘mountain’ and starts trying to level it down. The first shovel-full turns up a big piece of fiberglass. The second shovel-full turns up dinosaur bones. Really. At least, that’s what it looks like. I have photo evidence to support my claim! Not really dinosaur bones I guess… But definitely something strange. Many more odd things come out of that hill… including a tool useful in our continuing tile-adhesive-removal project. I shudder to think what he might turn up next.

So James goes over to talk to our neighbor who is adding TWO additional Sentinel Candy Canes® to his palm trees and singing his heart out to the music on his iPod… And James interrupts the festivities to ask about our mysterious backyard problems… And Ray is a fountain of knowledge about our house. He tells a most pathetic story. Ok, the guy who owned our house before… He had lived there three weeks. And the pool was so nasty that he decided to clean it. He didn’t know a lot about cleaning pools so he drained most of the water out and started scrubbing. It was a big job… He scrubbed and scrubbed… But he got tired of it and didn’t finish. And it started to rain. And it rained and rained and rained. And the rain seeped into the ground and started to fill up the space beneath the pool. Since the pool was nearly empty, it didn’t weigh as much as it should. And as the ground became more and more saturated the pool started to lift up out of its hole. And it cracked. And when our hapless homeowner called to get a repair estimate of $8000, he snapped. He said No Way! And busted that pool up and buried its remains. So James and I have an underground pool. We think it should be listed as a feature if we ever sell this house.