His Boss’s Wife Refused to Pay His Father the $7,800 She Owed for Nine Days of Pool Repairs, Acting Like She Could Get Away Without Paying—But When His Father Finally Revealed What He Had Documented, She Realized She Had Made a Costly Mistake.
Part 2 — What Was Under the Pool
The granite survey markers were buried eighteen inches below the concrete pool deck.
Dad found the first one on day five of the repair. He was excavating a trench along the eastern wall of the pool to access a cracked drainage pipe when his shovel struck something that was not pipe, not rock, and not the compacted fill material that typically surrounds a pool foundation.
It was a cut granite block, approximately twelve inches square, with a chiseled cross on the top face. A survey marker. The kind that property surveyors set into the ground decades before GPS existed, when the boundary of a parcel was defined by physical objects placed at measured intervals along the property line.
Dad knew what it was immediately. He had encountered survey markers on previous jobs. Most were unremarkable. Boundary stones that confirmed what modern records already showed.
This one was different.
This one was eighteen inches below a concrete deck that had been poured twelve years ago when Richard’s pool was installed. Which meant the marker had been buried, deliberately or carelessly, during construction. And burying a survey marker is not a minor oversight. It is the removal of a physical record that defines where one person’s property ends and another’s begins.
Dad did not remove the marker. He photographed it in place. He measured its position relative to the pool wall, the house foundation, and the property fence. He recorded the GPS coordinates using his phone. He noted the date and time.
Then he kept digging.
He found the second marker on day seven. Four feet from the first. Same granite. Same chiseled cross. Same depth. Buried beneath the same concrete.
Between the two markers, he found something else. The remnants of a stone foundation. Not a modern foundation. Old fieldstone, laid without mortar, the kind of construction used in rural Virginia in the early twentieth century for outbuildings, well houses, and property boundary walls.
The foundation ran in a straight line between the two markers. It was the physical manifestation of a property boundary that had existed long before Richard’s house, Richard’s pool, or Richard’s two-million-dollar mortgage.
Dad documented everything. Twenty-three photographs. A hand-drawn site map. Written descriptions of each marker’s condition, position, and surrounding soil composition. He placed the documentation in his work folder alongside the signed authorizations that proved Richard and Melissa had given him written permission to excavate in exactly the area where the markers were found.
That was why he had insisted they sign every page.
Not because he anticipated a payment dispute. Because a contractor who excavates on another person’s property without written authorization can be accused of trespassing, tampering, or fabricating evidence. A contractor who excavates with signed, itemized authorization from the property owner is performing permitted work and anything he discovers during that work is a legitimate finding.
Dad had learned this lesson years ago from a job where a homeowner accused him of damaging a buried utility line. The homeowner had not signed the work authorization. The dispute cost Dad $3,000 in legal fees. He told me afterward that he would never touch another person’s property without their signature on every page, and he had kept that promise for fifteen years.
Richard and Melissa’s signatures were on every page.
The markers were documented. The foundation was photographed. The evidence was organized.
And the woman whose family’s name appeared on the original deed was one phone call away.
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