The Pool at Garfield - Part 1

After a month of meeting with pool companies and working through designs and costs we finally selected Coast to Coast Pools of Sarasota to build our pool at Garfield Dr. in Sarasota.  The deciding factor was the experience of Jeremy West, the pool sales contact and designer and the track record of Coast to Coast in building pools locally.  Jeremy has over 10 years in the local pool business and has a very hands on approach with his customers.  He was always available, flexible and patient as we worked through the design.  Along the way he provided some very cool 3D clip to help use visualize the pool design.   He also has a lot of local contacts and communicated well with the city in order to avoid surprises. 

I never thought we'd build a pool in the front yard of any home but we are at Garfield.   The lot is on a corner and is 60' x 120' with the house right in the middle.  There is no backyard and we are only about 8 ft from the back property line.  All the  room is on the ends of the house and front yard.

I know this sounds funny but one of the key things we wanted was to duplicate the size and depth of our current pool - for pool volleyball!  (Jeremy laughed about this requirement),  Two other critical needs were a spa and a sun-shelf.  For those of you that don't know a sun-shelf is a 6" deep area of water that you can place your chair in.  We added on that's 8 ft deep and 12 ft wide at the shallow end of the pool along with a hole from an umbrella.  This will be a great spot to chill with some cocktails in the future.

The spa should be big enough for 6 people and with the propane heater we might be able to par boil people if we decide to.  The wireless Easy Touch wireless controller will make it easy for Jan to turn the spa on automatically from her lounge chair.  It also controls the pool lights.  1200 sq ft or so of travertine pavers and landscaping will create some serious outdoor space for those parties we love to have.

We are excited about the pool design and looking forward to the house warming pool party in April and yes Jeremy is invited.  He may come up with a Volleyball pool package in the future!  Stay tuned for Part 2 - I'm told the hole is dug in 3 hours.
 

Cable to Nowhere

There's always a few surprises when you buy a house "as is" even if you have it inspected.  Today we found a surprise with the cable in the master bedroom.

Both Jan and I like to watch TV in bed at night (probably like most of the population) however the Garfield house did not have an extra TV. So we purchased a 39" HDTV and wall mount during black friday and had it shipped.  In the meantime she picked up a DTA converter box from the cable company in the event we needed it.

The TV showed up last Friday and I proceeded to hook it up after dinner.  There was a cable outlet and power plug behind the dresser so I it was fairly easy to hook up.  Problem was there was no signal so I called Comcast to work through the issue.  30 minutes later I hung up in fruistration and decided to test the TV out on the cable in the living room.  It worked great!

That's when I realized the cable guy mentioned that he disconnected a splitter when he hooked up the TVin the living room.  Saturday after finsihing up some trim work I decided to hunt down the splitter and reconnect it. After trying three different wires running to who knows where on the side of the hosue I decided to check the cable outlets.  That's where I found the problem.


The previous owner pulled a fast one. There was a nice cable box and even cable connected to the box but when I pulled on the cable this came right out of the box.  Same thing in the other room.   Both outlets had about a foot of cable jammed into the wall to give the appearance there was acutal cable!  The wire was just cut off and attached to nothing in the wall.

Guess I'll need to add to the list of things to do now and run some cable through the attic and to the outlet.  Works never done and at least this will be an easy fix.  (hopefully)