The Resort Years - 5

Shared Expenses

Being a condominium was definitely advantageous when repairs to our shared infrastructure were needed! Our very first concern, twenty 26 years ago, was a septic system, which made smelly puddles in the bottom of the circle roadway whenever we were fully occupied for a few weeks.  The baking soda from the pool supply storage “covered up” the smell.  WHY, we all asked ourselves, did we even have the problem when it was a newly engineered system just prior to our ownership?  First, we decided it was the melting snow behind the four upper cabins flooding the leach field on its way to the river, so the president of our Homeowners Association - who was an engineer with experience getting things accomplished in the business world - contacted the engineer who had done the septic system design and his liability insurance paid to have a French Drain installed behind the upper cabins to channel the melting snow away from the leach field.  That was good and the melt still runs out of that drain without going through the leach field!

However, we still had the puddles of escaping sewage when fully occupied so another solution was needed.  Perhaps the original engineer had been given the YEARLY occupancy number to work with when, at the time at least, we were FULL for the nearly three months of summer!  Totally different scenario!  A DIFFERENT engineer suggested a complimentary leach field with a device to alternate between the two on a rotating basis.  Dave Graham, the excavator, was happy to trench in five more lines and the “carousel” device.  AND, the very conservative Homeowner’s Association had the funds in hand to pay for it.  That Homeowner’s Association fee each month was so helpful.

My husband, having been in the excavating business when we lived in Colorado, noticed a few years later that the carousels – now two of them – were loading up with grease and suggested strongly that an additional tank be installed with filters on the outflow to not only cool the outflow but to catch the grease before it was pumped up to the leach fields.  We contacted Dave Graham and his time was all taken up that year, so Tom secured a backhoe and our son Tom helped dig a hole in the drive between Units #4 and #3.  The handyman, Leni, and his pre-teen son, Wiley, helped with the parts and pieces that Mr Bell, the engineer, had designed for the installation.  Some of them were extraneous since the “as built” drawing of the previous system wasn’t exactly “as built” (;-) This bit of infrastructure DID cost us each some money, but not nearly as much as if we had had to pay an excavator, footing the bill individually.  The owners all appreciated the expertise that Tom brought to the problem.  It was an interesting couple of weeks as we had guests in the Resort at the time.

We still had a continuing problem of smell by the Unit #10 deck, which was not solved by an air filter.   It was finally sorted out where that was coming from – the Store leach field under the shed and above Unit #2.  Solution there was forcing a new leach field on the owners of the Store since it was a disclosed situation, just waiting to be a problem.  The previous occupants of the housing above the Store were an elderly couple who did their laundry at their daughter’s house!!  The new owners were a couple with FOUR teenagers, producing a lot of water usage!! 

Then there were the small problems – the map showed that the corner of #3s new deck was in the “OPEN SPACE” so if they had to replace it - ???  “Open Space” when Strawberry is surrounded by thousands of acres of National Forest and Wilderness is just five miles away?  Such is life in the USA!  Then there were the folks who couldn’t seem to see the importance of signing the official map.  Seems it took over a year to complete the last of the “official duties” of purchasing into a condomineum resort. The CC&Rs had some redundant phrases, and some conflicting ones.  Some of the By-laws didn’t apply in our situation…small issues, sometimes made larger by the egos involved.  Did we want the Resort to look like a “planned community” or leave it more natural?  THEN the water company was purchased by Del Oro Water out of Chico!!