Or as it was sometimes known overseas “Robinson’s Folly”. Seriously this experience alone convinced me to never, ever get involved in any type of home improvement or construction project. I could write five days worth of rants just on this little gem. In fact if you ever want to get me wound up simply mention this – mission accomplished. I’ll hit the highlights and then link to the ‘visual essay’ that is 7mb and will probably crush the limited DTOM servers – we’ll see.
So after having the dogs and our house for awhile we were never happy with the layout of the yard. We’re on a pretty steep hill, with another steep hill behind us so we constantly had drainage problems, there was no landscaping to speak of so it looked like crap basically. After living with this for awhile we decided that we wanted a) a bigger and level yard and b) the ability to put up a fence. Both of these would ideally help with the drainage that was washing out our yard every hard rain, and give more room for the dogs to use as a toilet.
Roughly at this same time there was a landscaper in our neighborhood that had just completed a fairly large and complicated waterfall / pond deal for some people down the road. We went and looked at it, and spoke to them about some options. Now my thinking was – building something with huge rocks, plants, and water moving around is a lot more complicated than a wall. Boy, what did I know. So we priced out the options, for a timber wall – cheap but ugly and didn’t last, a paver type retaining wall ‘system’ – moderately expensive, durable, but still not that attractive, and finally settled on a poured wall with a brick face – expensive, durable, and attractive. The idea was this wall would blend in nicely to the wall that exists in front of our house.
After securing funding and establishing a rough 1 month plan from start to finish we broke ground. The first hurdle we faced was a large chunk of ‘granite?’ that prevented the wall from going exactly where we wanted. It also broke a few pieces of machinery and we spent probably 2 weeks chipping away at this thing. Finally the landscaper started talking about dynamite. I said we’d done well enough. Visions of every window in the neighborhood being blown out and me picking up the tab helped make up my mind. During this period of time we discovered our landscaper was pretty much the same as every one of these guys I’ve ever dealt with. The 1 month estimate was correct “IF” that was the only job he was doing and if he really paid attention to it.
The second hurdle was the wall itself. Given the placement now of the rock instead of doing 2 small-ish walls we decided we’d do one big one instead. This meant getting an engineer to draw the wall, and securing the permits and approvals from the city. This wasn’t too much trouble, but did add time to the process. Oh and the way engineers draw walls is no joke. This thing would survive a direct hit with a bomb. I would later find out just how much extra $$ this would add to the project, there was as much concrete and rebar in the footings as in the wall itself.
So, we had our drawings, the basic excavation was done, and it was time to build out the footers. This was our third and biggest hurdle. Before we got started I had a survey done and also sent out our plans for approval to our neighborhood aesthetic committee. As the workers were building our footers, our next door neighbor came out and told them to stop or he was calling the police as they were digging on his yard? I come home from work and see that they’re well within our property line. Being the good neighbor I attempt to explain where the property lines are and what that means to our ‘foreign’ neighbor who explains to me that he was an engineer in Egypt? Well the curriculum they’re following must not be the same one the dudes that built the pyramids followed since this guy doesn’t understand property rights, footers, or even how a poured concrete wall worked. He kept thinking it was going to fall over onto his house, but I think he was just playing the ‘foreign’ card because he wasn’t hearing what he wanted.
We agreed to disagree and I gave him a period of time to get his own survey done since he didn’t believe mine. In the meantime I also called another company just to double check the first places work. They came out and confirmed what we already knew. In the meantime “Tommy” wouldn’t move on his. Then in some classic neighborhood politics their friend who happened to be the association president called and said we had to stop since he hadn’t given approval. I informed him of what we sent out and who we had talked to, and sent him the copy of the approval email from the committee (that had the right to review per the bylaws). He basically said that didn’t matter he was the president. At this point I finally lost my temper and told this dude to “F_CK OFF since I wasn’t planting a GD bush we had already spent thousands of dollars.” I also told him (knowing what a cheap a$$ neighborhood I live in) that I was getting a lawyer and if he wanted to go around with his hat out to all our neighbors to get one to fight me just for one guy after the other 3 houses saw what we were doing and liked it – he could be my guest. Roughly 3 days after that conversation we got a letter in the mail announcing his resignation. One of my proudest moments.
I come out of my pocket again to have a lawyer drive over review everything, talk to me, and then render an opinion. He tells me (again) what I already know, not only am I well within my rights I can actually tell Tommy to remove the poured concrete wall that is attached to his house off my property. We craft a letter to that effect and tell Tommy we’re moving on. To this day I can’t even look at that toad without getting angry, he still doesn’t get it.
From this point it went pretty smoothly but all of this had consumed considerable budget so we went from 1st class to economy pretty quickly. Since several mistakes with the landscaper had eaten additional funds he couldn’t afford to correct so he was working for free more or less and I was paying subs directly and effectively managing the whole process at the end. We finished on December 7th at 6pm I remember because Christine had a school Christmas party at our house and I was laying sod with mi amigos right up until the bell.
So if you want to see the “Great Wall of Jim” click the link and download a few months of my life and many of my dollars. We started in July and finished (fence and all) officially in Jan.
Tomorrow “Special Delivery”…
