A lot of people spend a lot of time wondering what the neighbors think.

We Pucketts - also known as the Loud Family - don't spend nearly enough time wondering what our neighbors think of us, and very little wondering what the neighbors hear¹ - I'll bet that our neighbors wish that we did, indeed, spend more time and exercised more concern along those lines.

But we are concerned with what the neighbors see.

These four homes were all built by the same builder, across five acres; one to the east, one to the west, one to the north, and our house in the middle.  Each is a custom home, but they are all Santa Fe style, and share certain architectural elements. And there is a gentleman's agreement between the homeowners that we won't ugly the places up too badly.

(This agreement was never agreed to, nor recognized, by the Demon Family, who lived in the East House briefly - we call them the Demon Family because, well, they had demon statues in the front yard. They weren't here that long, anyway).

So now that the pool is built and the landscaping effort is winding down, I decided to take some pictures of  What The Neighbors See when they look at our new pool.

The West House, which is downhill and views my house across my lower half-acre, doesn't see that much -



- you can just see the tile backing on the edge basin, and some of the new palms that we've put in near the back porch.

Anyway, those folks have their own pool, and their own palm trees, and there's a wall between them and us, so they probably don't look over at my yard very often, any way.

But the North House, which is the closest, also has their front door facing my back porch, so they are sort of forced to look into our little world. However, they do have a nice view of the backside of the pool - they say that they are very happy with their new waterfall (which is what our pool is when the edge pump is running : ) and that they like the rock work that we've done over there:


               

Those five Queen Palms that you see lined up there are the ones that we had planted to keep Ethel from seeing the Junk House - they help, but they don't hide.

And the Demon family, if there were still there, would see this from their back porch, while they were wearing goatskin leggings and sacrificing virgins:




It all looks okay, to may way of thinking - if we did have an HOA, they'd probably leave us alone.

The curious - with plenty of time on their hands - might find it interesting to compare these images with those I took when I took a walk around the house back while we were still waiting to move in² . The yard definitely looks different now; that's quite an interesting comparison. I'm not sure which I like better - the home now, or before we did our "improvements".

But I do know which one Ethel likes better : )






¹Actually, I suspect that Ethel does care what the neighbors hear, based on how she tries to get me to shut up whenever we are outside; but since Ethel, despite her beliefs to the contrary, is not the corporate conscience for "the Pucketts", I'll stick by my first statement.
²An interesting comment in that two-year-old post is a reference to the spot that Ethel had picked to, someday, put in a negative-edge pool. Well, dear, you pulled it off : )