Fast, Cheap, and Illegal: The Shebandowan Hot Tub Incident

A guy named Bryce from Mississauga bought a summer camp out at Shebandowan last October. He tracked me down because he wanted a poured concrete pad for a six-person therapeutic Jacuzzi.

He handed me his blueprint. It was a sketch on the back of a Tim Hortons napkin.

I looked at the napkin. I looked at Bryce. "Where is the excavation?" I asked him. "Where are the footings?"

He told me he wanted it fast and cheap. He said his brother-in-law back in Oakville just poured concrete directly out of the bag onto some crushed gravel. I had to take a very deep breath to stop myself from throwing my Stanley tape measure straight into the lake.

"Bryce," I said, zipping up my Thunder Bay dinner jacket, "this is the Canadian Shield. You haggle on the rebar, you skimp on the frost line? I am telling you the honest truth. When the frost heave hits in January, the ground is going to bulge, your fiberglass tub will buckle, and you will be launched directly into those birch trees."

He asked if we could just skip the permits to save a few bucks.

I told him that is a code violation. I told him I pour proper footings for a solid foundation, or I don't pour at all. He got instantly defensive about the estimate I gave him.

I packed up my wheelbarrow and my trowels. I looked back at his miserable little patch of exposed dirt.

"Frankly, Bryce," I told him, "if I built it any better, you couldn't afford it."

I drove off, wrote these lyrics in the cab of my truck, and left him to deal with the cold reality of physics.