Wise people learn from their mistakes. I’m not one of those people.
I make the same basic mistakes over and over and over again. I underestimate how difficult things will be and I’m cheap.
Combined, these two traits lead to unwise decisions with stunning frequency.
I once put a new roof on our very oddly shaped little shack.. I’d never put a roof on anything, but the quote was 10 grand. Eff that, I’ll do it myself. I figured how hard could it be. Get a few friends and cases of beer and it would be done in a weekend. Three months of weekends later, on the roof by myself with snow flying, I nailed down the last of the shingles.
Another time, I convinced my wife, Lisa Grassi Blais, to fly to Italy from our home in Canada and patch and paint the walls on the entire second floor of an old villa we were renovating into a vacation destination. The quote was five grand. For some plaster and paint? Screw that, we’ll do it ourselves. How hard could it be?
It was a 10-day trip and I figured a couple days of work and eight days of wine-sipping and relaxation. On day eight, Lisa fell asleep with a paint brush in her hand as I finished the last wall. Day nine, we slept. Day 10, we flew back across the ocean exhausted.
Those are just two examples, but you get it. I can make some pretty unwise decisions when I think something is too expensive.
It happened again last summer when we were trying to figure out if we would expand our all-inclusive tour business to a second location in the town of Torre de’Passeri in Italy’s Abruzzo region, about 150 kilometers east of Rome.
Before we could make that decision, we had appraisals of the amount of work, time, and money it would take to bring the location, a slightly neglected Baron’s Estate, up to speed. Part of that was seeing how much it would take to get the Estate’s pool working again. The pool hadn’t been touched in more than five years and nature had begun to take it over. It looked and smelled like a swamp complete with thousands of frogs and a couple water snakes living in greenish-brown water with branches and a decaying plastic tarp floating in the muck.
We called a pool expert. He said before he could do anything, the pool needed to be cleaned. The estimate for the cleaning was … five grand. Bollocks to that. We’ll do it ourselves. How hard could it be? A couple days with my buddy Domenico, and it would be done.
I got our electric sump pump, rigged up a garden hose to take the water to the sewer grate on the nearby road and turned it on. It pumped just fine as we started fishing the stinking tarp and major tree branches out. After that, we hunted and trapped about 50 kilos of frogs and transferred them to an artificial pond on the Estate’s grounds. The snakes proved elusive. Every time we got the net close, they dove into the murk and disappeared. Still, I figured as the water went down, they would have less and less space to hide and I’d get them eventually.
After a day of pumping, the water had, indeed, gone down – about two inches. This freakin’ pool was huge. Fifteen by eight meters and about 2 ½ meters deep. I bought another pump and got it going.
After about a week, a six-inch slick of decomposing leaves, plastic and dirt that looked and smelled like a sewage plant emerged at the bottom of the shallow end. With shovels and buckets, we descended into the putrid morass and started removing the sludge by hand. It was July. The temperature was in the high 30s. If this task had been part of a criminal sentence, we would have been declared cruel and unusual punishment.
How hard could it be? I had my answer. Really freakin’ hard.
I told Domenico that if he wanted to quit, I wouldn’t hold it against him. He stayed on and for a week as the sun beat down and the pumps emptied the deep end, we humped buckets of biochemically dubious sludge out of that pool while the stank permeated our skins. We left our clothes there, we took showers there and at home, but we both smelled like swamp rats for weeks.
We found the two snakes one by one in the sludge. They were fat from years of frogs on demand. We scooped them up and wished them God speed through snake heaven.
When the bulk of the sludge was finally gone, the beating sun baked the residual into a cement-like veneer on the mosaic tiles. It was bound so tight, not even a power washer filled with nasty cleaning chemicals could lift it. We had to soak it with alcohol and vinegar for days, and then we used scrub brushes attached to poles and scoured for two straight days under the blinding sun.
When it was done, we called the pool expert. He came and did his assessment. We needed some mosaic tiles replaced and the lights fixed. The pumps and pipes worked fine. Some new filters and switches were needed. Not bad at all. The total estimate to get the pool going after the cleaning was about €2000, less than half the estimate of cleaning it.
The final works start tomorrow and it’s going to be great. I don’t know why the Baron’s family put in such a large pool, but it sure works for what we are doing.
In total, cleaning it took almost four weeks and about 120 hours of work for both Domenico and I. We burned out a €400 pump and spent another €500 on other stuff.
Was it worth it?
Hell no.
Will I do something like that again?
Hell ya.
Why?
Because, as I said early, I’m not one of those wise people who learn from my mistakes – and I’m cheap.
Five grand to clean a pool?
Eff that.
