Many of our older homes here don’t have a garage, so parking that Cadillac Escalade or Ford F350 can sometimes be a challenge, especially if one has toddlers or sacks full of groceries.

The following picture is of a home on Coronado Island that had been renovated and had a one-car garage added to the rear of the house. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the utility company to move their stupid utility pole:

That garage, while big enough for a mid-size car like a Camry or Accord, would not accommodate anything other than a golf cart until the pole gets moved. Unfortunately the utility company declined to move it.

The gas meter was moved to the left side of the new garage, but just a little planning and four more feet or so could have provided the clearance needed.

This also illustrates something that really irritates me about people working in or on real estate here in Southern California, and that’s the lack of cross training. Quite often, the concrete guy is sent out to pour a driveway, and that’s exactly what he does. He’s not paid, or encouraged, to tell anyone, “If I pour the driveway there, the telephone pole is in the way.”

Manual laborers don’t get paid, and are not encouraged, to actually think about how something they are supposed to do could affect something else or someone else’s work.

When I was a contractor in Texas, we did just about everything. If the plumber didn’t show up that day, guess who did plumbing? If the bricklayer didn’t show up, guess who laid brick? Such cross-training doesn’t exist anymore, which can be both good and bad, but I never had a project come in over budget or past deadline because we all knew how to cover for each other, and were quite happy to do so, to help.