Tag: house

Liquid Dreams

On the few occasions I buy water at a convenience store, I don’t think twice about downing the bottle I just paid two dollars for. Maybe you pay more or maybe you pay less, but I’m guessing the price doesn’t make you hesitate either. Even so, you could’ve gotten the same sixteen ounces for free out of your kitchen tap. That kind of thinking danced in my head last week when I reviewed a contractor’s bid for a new swimming pool in our backyard. I mean, it’s basically a divot filled with water.  How much could it possibly cost?

Like fancy cars and country clubs, I’ve just been reminded a pool earns the label of “luxury item”.  It’s a something you may want but definitely a something you don’t need.  The cost is just one of the reasons people flock to public pools instead of having one of their own.  But even public pools aren’t free. Maintenance. Insurance. Labor (lifeguards). The water itself.  The list goes on and on; the same costs you’d have with your own pool.  Okay, maybe not the lifeguards (unless my wife has visions of Baywatch studs in our backyard) but add it all up and pools are expensive with a capital E.

The contractor was more than happy to stop by our house last week for a look.  He loved the proposed location: flat, unobstructed, and right behind the back porch.  Then we debated the dimensions.  My wife wanted a lap lane for exercise, but just how long should a lap lane be?  Forty feet? Fifty feet?  Something to host the next Olympic Games?  Eventually we settled on fifty.  Then we added a “sun shelf” at one end for the grandchildren and a small patio at the other for an umbrella table and chairs.

Here’s where I got annoyed and suspicious (take your pick).  The whole time we’re talking, the pool contractor is doing nothing else besides talking.  He’s not sketching, he’s not measuring or taking notes, and he has no examples of what we’re looking for.  He’s just talking and nodding his head.  He did manage to find time to tell us how he likes to take his boat to the Bahamas several times a year (!) And before I could wrap my head around that he shook my hand with a hearty “Okay Dave! I’ll get you a quote by next week!”.

Well, “next week” is this week and I’m staring at a single page with a single number.  $89,750 without any bells or whistles.  Go ahead and gasp the way I did, as if you’re underwater in your new pool and can’t breathe (heh).  A few of you – those who already have pools – are nodding your heads and saying, “Yep, sounds about right, Dave.”  But now all I’m thinking about is how I’m helping this guy make his mortgage payments on his boat.  The quote is suspiciously vague as well; not even broken down into labor and materials.  My pool does come with a net and brush, a session of “pool school”, and an underwater light (“whoo-hoo”).  I also get a credit for “no diving board”, even though it doesn’t say for how much.

This experience reminds me of our last house, and a contractor who gave us a bid on a very large all-seasons deck.  We talked briefly while he stood on our lawn, gazing over to where the deck would go.  Then he held up his hands as if framing a painting.  After a few moments of silence he turned to us and simply said, “$200,000”.  Seriously?  Not only can you instantly estimate the cost of our new deck, but the number comes out to exactly $200k?  So I asked this guy for a more detailed quote and he said, “Yeah, no.  I am an artist (he pronounced it “ar-teest“).  People pay good money for my work”.  Yeah, not these people pal.

Our community has a small pool, sized to somewhere between soaking and short laps.  Really short laps.  My wife will take two or three strokes before having to think about her flip move to head the other way.  She’ll burn more calories switching directions than she will the swimming itself.  But hey, at least we won’t have to worry about the maintenance and insurance (or the mortgage payments on someone else’s boat).  For now at least, our pool will remain a liquid dream.

Atlas Joins the Family

My wife and I embarked on an extensive remodel of our house a week ago. We’re rewarding ourselves for removing “college tuition” from the family budget (an expense we’ve battled for the last ten years). Our remodel aims to remove a bearing wall between the family room and kitchen, rewarding us with unobstructed views from the east-side entry to the west-side windows, and the glorious Colorado Rocky Mountains beyond. It’s a construction zone around here for the better part of two months.  The master bedroom and the horse barn are our only refuge.

Removing a bearing wall usually requires a little structural re-engineering, and this project is no exception. We have two bedrooms and a bath upstairs which would come a-tumblin’ down like Jericho’s walls if we took sledgehammers to the studs. Rather, the work begins down under, below the pulled-back carpet of our finished basement. From the naked foundation we excavated a 42″ x 42″ block of standard concrete, to be replaced with several bags of the 5,000 PSI compression-strength variety.  You need the heavy-duty stuff if you’re going to hold up a house.

This super-strength basement footing will support a solid steel post, rising to the main floor and framing the north end of the new opening.  The south end already has a post.  And spanning the top of both, eighteen feet long and weighing in at an impressive four hundred pounds, is our new friend Atlas.

            

Atlas is a big, bad, beautiful, hot-rolled I-beam, formed from pure American steel.  When this behemoth landed in our driveway last Friday my first thought was, “not very big”.  Atlas would’ve smiled if he could, because he didn’t budge a millimeter when I made him pose for a photo.  Or maybe he’s just a stubborn I-beam.

Atlas gets his name from the god in Greek Mythology, of course.  Atlas and his brother Menoetius lost a war to the Olympians (never should’ve sided with the Titans, boys).  Menoetius went to a dungeon of torment and suffering.  Atlas went to the western edge of the world, forced to hold up the sky for all eternity.  Several statues depict him holding up the earth, but in fact Atlas’s burden is the sky.  One time, “clever” Atlas handed off the sky to a guy named Heracles with the promise to fetch him some golden apples.  But Heracles realized it was a ploy to exchange the burden.  When Heracles convinced Atlas to briefly hold up the sky again so he could “rearrange his cloak on his shoulders”, Heracles grabbed the golden apples and ran away.  Not so clever for a Greek god.  I hope our own Atlas is a little more accountable to his burden than his namesake.

Perhaps your first thought of “atlas” is a book of maps instead of a Greek god.  Perhaps you’ve been to the Atlas Mountains in northwestern Africa.  Maybe you’ve read all 1,168 pages of Atlas Shrugged, the 1957 dystopian novel by Ayn Rand.  Did you know the Atlantic Ocean is named for Atlas?  Ditto the fictional island of Atlantis?  At the very least, you have an atlas on your person: the first vertebra supporting your head.  Now you can add a new definition to the list.  Atlas is an I-beam in a house in Southern Colorado.

Final thought.  After naming our I-beam, I was delighted to learn an atlas is also defined as “a support sculpted in the form of a man, which may take the form of a column, pier or pilaster”.  No, I’m not about to sculpt my big, bad, beautiful, hot-rolled I-beam, but it’s nice to know our remodel has a bit of classical European architecture influence.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.