The Resort Years - 6

WATER

The installation of individual meters was “supposed to” have been part of the subdivision / condominium deal, but not knowing WHERE the existing water lines ran and how they intersected / ran parallel to the sewer and propane lines was a tremendous problem.  So THAT was a disclosure just waiting to be a problem!!

When the Del Oro Water Company, and the State of California, insisted that the individual meters must be installed and it was mentioned by our president that the individual bills might cause the owners of the various cabins to make the upgrades to their water-using appliances. Our President convinced us all that it had to happen.  His clincher was that we would have all NEW water lines – boy did THAT need to happen!!  Some of those old lines were nearly “Swiss Cheesed” after over fifty years.

It made for a dusty Spring following a late winter and we were apologizing all summer for the dust!  That Fall every carpet in the complex received a commercial cleaning after the housekeepers finished the Fall Cleaning!!

The Homeowner’s Association graciously insisted that a separate meter be installed with the pool side hose bib so they could cover the expense of “topping off” the pool in the summer, something that had been going through the one meter for the whole resort previously. I get to figure out how much of Unit #1s water goes into the pool through that meter during the summer and the Homeowner’s Association reimburses us for that expense.  It is not a difficult task, very similar to reading the electric meters when we owned the Trailer Park across the highway, behind the Strawberry Inn.  I also bill each cabin for the monthly fee for their guests to use “our” pool.  We discovered just recently that the pool was built in 1957, because in 1958 Kevin McDowell’s brothers were the first “life guards” and he remembered that his grandfather had paid $300 to help with the building of the pool and then yearly dues of $100 per year.  That was a LOT of money in the 50s; the yearly fee is $225 now.

Pool – amenity or atrocity?

Each year it is a worry as to whether the POOL can be filled, but so far, so good!   Because the pool is NOT plastered, it is drained each year, repainted if necessary and put back together.  The furniture is stored in the two restrooms by the pool and under Unit #1, the parts and pieces are removed to keep the vandals from helping themselves.  Some years chunks of tile fall off the walls due to water inflow from the dirt behind the sixty year old concrete walls or melting snow on the deck – partially wood, and partially 16 yards of concrete poured about 15 years ago.

After a particularly bad report from the environmental health inspector one year and some cold and dissatisfied guests, we HAD to replace the pool heater, sand filter, and chlorinator and tidy up the bathrooms! I had tiled a bathroom floor in our house in San Jose, and had tiled a bathtub enclosure at the Inn.  I thought I could tile the pool and started in the Fall to remove the weathered, lopsided old (at least 20 years!) tile and tried to get a “bed” made to received the new tile in the Spring!!  Enter son Allan who “had a friend” who was a professional tile setter!!  Praise GOD!  Not cheap, but well worth the money!   It is wisdom to know when you are NOT professional, but a “Jack of all trades” and when to say WHOA!

The new tile job held up really well for several years, then again two foot sections would delaminate from the side and if they did not fall off, they looked as if they would, held there by the tile grout.  The time for painting the pool once the prep was done had gotten down to 4 hours with a second person doing the wall under the tile so the paint roller person could work faster.

Occasionally, the extra person had to run a quick trip to the paint store in East Sonora for more paint, but that too was something that we got used to organizing, by noting the quantity of pool paint on the reservations sheet, along with the time taken to apply it!

A couple of years ago my handyman of several years – Mark - picked Spring to decide that his injured-in-a-car-accident back just couldn’t work for us any longer.  Great timing with a pool full of winter’s debris and needing a paint job! 

A couple with three small children, one just a baby, were spending a weekend in Cabin 7.  He had asked just the day before if I needed a handyman.  So as soon as I heard the “bad news” I went to the cabin to tell him he was hired, but I found his wife in tears and no husband!!  I thought I had bad news!  He had left the food and the kids’ car seats and told her to call her brother-in-law in the Bay Area to come and get her and the kids.  She didn’t want to do that, but did agree to move to our Unit #1 and rake pine needles for her lodging.  I took her to Walmart for a cheapo cell phone so she could call her sister and tell her the situation.  Took her to Interfaith for some food and shoes for the two kids who only had their sandals with them.  She was SOOO THANKFUL, several of the volunteers commented to me later that they rarely hear “Thank You.”  Her name was Ann and if that means “gracious” I would not be surprised!

A week later her husband came back after discovering that she hadn’t called for a ride to her sister’s, and he agreed to help with the pool cleanup and getting the lounges back out of storage for the summer season.  They were due to leave before Memorial Day.  He dropped dead from effects of his lymphoma - which he had fought for three YEARS - just three days before their scheduled departure.  She was in a safe place when he died, which I am sure was his intent!  They had taken a LONG hike to Relief Reservoir just a few days before, we were all thankful that he had not died miles into the forest with a wife and three small children, one just a baby!

The POOL Saga Continues

This last year – 2013 - the pool got all the cracks sealed, all the loose paint excised, and TWO coats of pool paint applied to the mended surfaces.  Water was added.  The next morning water in the shallow end was three inches deep rather than three FEET!!  We did diagnostic tests to see if the main drain was leaking as that had been a problem the previous year – six inches a day which was slowed down to two inches every two days with the pouring of “StopLeak” directly into the main drain and NOT USING that drain for the rest of the summer!!  We compared drawings of the main drain that Tom had discovered vs. the main drain that I remembered from previous years of washing out the paint chips and debris from the well below “the Virginia Graeme-Baker approved drain cover.”  (This was the first year that Tom was the pool startup person!) 

The well had a drain hole in the bottom, we agreed that it must have had a “stopper” of some kind in it that disappeared last year causing the massive leak problem.  Tom cemented a new stopper into THAT hole and we did some MORE diagnostic tests and decided that the drain line had to be the problem.  We even had a roto-rooter job done on the main drain to see if it was clogged with roots, indicating that it was crushed someplace!   Negative on the roots and the 2inch roto head went in and out just fine – no crack or crimp!  This SHOULD have caused us to realize that the main drain was NOT the problem, but it was decided to reline the drain line anyway, replaster the well with hydraulic cement and change all the right angles to 45 degree angles to get more flow through the 1 ½ hp pump – something that the County had been complaining about for several years!

Meanwhile, our neighbor was lamenting his humungeous water bill for this past May 2013.  Seems he was being charged for the equivalent of FIVE of our pools full of water.  He tried to claim it was a defective meter, the company checked it.  “Where are the gullies from that much water escaping?” he asked incredulously.  ‘Twas a puzzle!!

So once the reworking of the drain line was completed by my nearly 70 year old husband, me as go-fer and right-hand helper.  Son Tom even helped to excise the inflow metal fitting to disprove son Allan’s theory that it was a bathtub inside a box with space between that filled with water!  Great theory not supported by fact – the wall was solid but now has a new inflow line, which doesn’t leak either!  Water was added a second time!  The next morning only two inches was missing, but the morning after – FOUR FEET!!  If I had had access to a stick of dynamite the deep end would have been empty too!!  Of course that would have broken several windows in the vicinity…

The mystery was solved with the aid of a large bore drill and a boroscope from son Tom.  A VOID four inches deep under the shallow end and who knows how wide caused the weight of the water to suck the water into the gulley, down the hillside and into the overflow leach field behind Unit #3, where it was pumped into the Resort leach field, effectively flushing it back to the River from whence it came, prior to being put through the local water system, the fire hydrant, and possibly our neighbor’s meter?  It would be hard to prove, so trying to get his liability insurance to cover our pool instability problem would require a lawyer and create a lot of ill-will, especially since the pool had a leak problem LAST YEAR!

When we filled the pool again, we lost 4 feet of water overnight.  Thanks to a bottle of red dye Tom found a place, the size of my little fingernail, which accepted the dye.  He put his long handled screwdriver in the hole and it went in up to the handle!!   He chistled out 23 feet of cracks, patched them with pool cement (which doesn’t need painting so no 14 day wait to fill with water!)  We filled the pool with two garden hoses this time, hoping that the longer fill time would allow the weight of the water to dissipate slowly. The water stayed in this time!!  Halleluia!!

The quick fix of concrete pool cement in 23 feet of cracks that Tom ground out with his Mikita drill equipped with wire brush got us through the last week of “pool people” even with a two to three inch water loss per day.  The higher the water level, the greater the loss due I would imagine to the WEIGHT of the water combined with the weight of the water aerobics ladies bouncing in the shallow end?  The grandchildren enjoyed the weekly exercise of squirting red dye into potential cracks, if it went down Grandma supplied a “worm” of epoxy (good under water even!) and the grandkids eagerly dove down to push it into the hole or crack!!

When it took two hours to skim the debris off the surface one evening, I pulled the power and called the “pool season” over!!  The Rim Fire, the largest EVER in the State of California, caused ash to fall in our area, also smoke and cancelled reservations.  The Fire was followed by the Federal Government Shutdown. The media made it sound like the road to Yosemite and to Sonora was barricaded and no one was allowed to visit our county.  Yosemite WAS shut down; the highway over Sonora Pass was the alternate route for many so the businesses here at least got the “thru traffic” and money spent on lunches and postcards!

We are now in a similar “defective pool” situation since the pool cement and epoxy fixes barely held the water loss to three inches a day (more than twice what evaporation would have caused!)   We are now needing to repair the 125 feet of CRACKS and secure the weight of the water in the sixty-year-old pool without “breaking the bank.”  Tom and our son Tom cut several holes in the bottom to SEE what the situation is and avoid an engineering charge or at least make the information available to the engineer…

Winter decided to skip us this year and hit the East Coast with record cold and snow!  Dodge Ridge Ski Area was able to open just in time for the President’s Weekend but the phone has not been ringing as we had hoped with that news flash!!  “It’s the ECONOMY, stupid!”  The huge increase in required health insurance premiums has everyone panicked about spending any money until they see how things turn out / turn around with the elections this fall?  Meanwhile, back at the OK Corral – the chisel and the drill bits are biting into the thrice-mended concrete to discover just how extensive the damage is and how MUCH it will cost to repair the swimming pool used for three months in the summer.

With no SNOW this winter, the chances of having enough water to fill the pool, and keep it full through the three months are not good!  The other resort with a pool is in the same quandary – their pool is empty and will there be enough water to fill it?   I am sure that the guests will be aware of the DROUGHT from the radio and TV and the notices from their water companies, but the majority of our owners seem to think that our guests should be TOLD that there might not be a pool this summer to avoid hard feelings…and WE need to decide whether to repair or turn it into a putting green by filling it with dirt!! 

Serenity is hard to come by with the ramifications of our decision hanging over our heads…wisdom is needed, and some serious numbers for our consideration.  Our bids have been $10,000 to $20,000 from a contractor who had no idea what he was talking about and no references who would even return my calls to the well recommended pool company from the Valley who was going to rebuild the pool for $40,000.00 sight unseen also!!  Amazing how much the fine print could cost when the person doing this bid looked “over the fence” and didn’t even bother to call and make an appointment to check out the actual conditions!