Beach Court (Part II)

The next step was to look into suitable drainage and then getting the sand in. Unfortunately, all of that was put on hold when my wife called me and said that some guy from the county of Santa Barbara had come by and put a work stoppage tag on the project. That was a couple of days after we had finished digging it all out.

Up to this point I had spent around $800 for the rental of the heavy equipment. Getting rid of all the greens, trash, ect... ended up costing quite a bit more than I anticipated. A couple hundred under $3,000. I was already in over $3500. I was hoping to be about a grand less than that but that is how it flies I guess.

Couldn't finish the court as I wanted because of the work stoppage order. Seems that if you move over 50 cubic yards of dirt on your property you have to get a land use permit in Santa Barbara County. Normally they would never bother with a beach volleyball court, but we have a wonderful neighbor who likes to get involved in everything and was afraid I was doing a commercial court or something. The county got a complaint and therefore they had to investigate it. The county guy actually apologized to me and seemed a little bit embarrassed and annoyed to be out busting a guy who wanted to put a little beach volleyball court in his backyard. He had bigger fish to fry and this was essentially a waste of his time. Now I had to jump through all the county hoops to get the land permit and this would take time.

To make matters worse, along came a deluge of rain in the month of March. Instead of a beach volleyball court in my backyard, I now had a duckpond!! I had to submit a ton of plans which fortunately Mark was familiar with and did all of the drawings. I submitted the plans along with a nice donation of almost $2G to the county to be able to build my beach court as well as all the fines because I did not get the permit before beginning the project even though every person I spoke with shook their head and asked me why on earth I was getting a permit for this beach court?

The plans eventually received the stamp of approval but I had already lost 2 months time as it was now late April of 2006. I also still had a my duck pond that was starting to dry out now but not enough so that I could start anything. To complicate matters I had already began the 2006 beach season and my weekends were now spoken for until late September. Mark, the guy helping me out, had the official start of fire season too so he was essentially out as well.

My project was now on hold until early fall depending on when they called the fire season. I was already in over $5G and the nice shaping ect... that Mark had done of the court was gone from all the rain beating down into the court. My troubles had only just begone though.