Bourgeois Concerns



Before

During the transition from spring to summer we were taken up with a section of our back yard we refer to as “the trellis.”  It’s a pergola-like structure along about a third of the back fence with a canopy of redwood 2x2s that covered a hot tub and a koi pond.  For the past year or so it had been slowly collapsing beneath the weight of a massive wisteria.  Every month the supporting 4x4s took on more of an angle.  The contractors we spoke to about the problem all said the wisteria would have to come down, so we asked our gardener if he could cut it back off the structure so the latter could be rebuilt and he said yes, he could, and it would survive, but 2 or 3 years would be required for it to recover and get back to where it was.  Then, scratching his chin, he offered that he could rebuild the trellis without harming the wisteria.  Now, up to that point I had had no direct knowledge of his carpentry skills, so by way of a preliminary test I gave him a little repair job on the opposite corner of the front yard, where the fence had gone wobbly, and he did a fine job with it, so we decided to let him have a go at the trellis. 

When we first moved into this house, many years ago, we were excited about having a hot tub and a koi pond, even though the previous owner had taken the koi with her.  But 2 weeks after we took up residence the pump quit.  As there were no koi and we had, as it were, other fish to fry, given that the deck was collapsing, we just drained it and got on with the more important project.  Over the years we’ve had some people look at it but they all wanted many thousands of dollars to get it operational again and it just wasn’t that important to us.  As for the hot tub, a relic of the 80s big enough for at least 3 couples, we noticed the first winter that keeping it hot was giving a hefty boost to our power bill.  We also noticed that we didn’t use it that much, so the second winter we elected to shut it down.  In the spring we opened it and found wads of slugs and worms, so we had to drain it, scrub it out, and refill it.  We used it that summer, but less than the summer before, because we had begun to realize we didn’t actually enjoy feeling like a cannibal’s dinner all that much.  When fall came we shut it down again and in the spring we scrubbed it out again, but that summer used it even less.  The following spring we just left it. 



After

So now, under the trellis, we had a cold tub chock full of disgusting critters and their even more disgusting excrement and a koi pond with nothing but soggy, decaying leaves in the bottom. Although it sounded nice to say you had a hot tub and a koi pond in your back yard, we weren’t actually getting any use or value out of either of them. They were just taking up space. So we decided to seize the opportunity presented by rebuilding the trellis to get rid of both of them. That would give us room to build a lower level onto the deck where we could put a table for outdoor dining and a gas grill. It’s surprising how many decisions this sort of thing entails. One thing leads to another and pretty soon a $3,000 project has become an $8,000 project. We already had electricity out there, a 120 volt line for a flood light on the koi pond and a 240 volt line to run the hot tub, so we figured we might as well put some more atmospheric lighting on the 120 line and an electric heater on the 240 line for chilly nights. So now we’ve got 3 lantern lights, 3 spots, and a hanging overhead light plus a fixture for another, all on dimmers, plus the heater and a plug for another, plus 4 outlets. I think we kind of overdid it, to tell the truth. The electrician was here for more than 2 full days putting all the lines in conduit.



At night



The cost of this project has insured that we won’t be getting back to Europe this year.  We’d been toying with the idea of a trip to the Costa Brava, our favorite part of Spain, where we haven’t been in a dozen years, combined with a stop in Mallorca, something new.  Or, alternatively, a trip back to Sicily to see at least a couple of the Aeolian Islands, plus Sardinia, and maybe even Apulia, the heel of the boot of Italy.  But now these hypothetical trips will have to be put off because of our friend the trellis and what lay beneath its shadow of shame.