Oops

I have complained about the quality of construction of our house before. It's all-the-more infuriating because everyone who walks into our house comments on how nice it is. They assume we live in this wonderful fantastic fantasy house, when in fact, it's a piece of....

Today, the pool guy commented on how nice the house is. I said, "Yeah, but.........." And then I commented that the new pool pump is quite loud. He said that's because when they built the house, they did the house and pool "all in one." I think he meant that they dug one hole, and laid one slab of concrete for both. So, all the pool pump noise transmits directly into our basement (and my tea room -- not exactly one of the "sounds" of tea that you expect to hear in the tea room). He said, "Yeah, they made a mistake." Uh, yeah, guess so!

And Wednesday, the gardener spent THREE hours here trying to mitigate the effects of another "mistake" they made when building the house. I lost two of my precious camelia bushes because of it. They didn't install the proper pipe to feed water to one of the flower beds in the garden. The gardener said he told them what to do when they built the house, but they didn't do it. So, there he was, trying to feed 30ft long rubber hoses from one end of the patio, underground, to the other end. We'll see if it worked.

That's all just indicative of the general quality of workmanship around here.