A new house

I was in a group of people who had gone together to buy a piece of land w/ a house on it that was way out in the wilderness away from anyone else.  When we got there the house was pretty much finished, but the landscaping around it was still just bare dirt.  It had been shaped in a way that allowed us to walk in to the basement from outside, but just beyond the basement entrance they had left a hole, like a small pond, maybe 50 feet across, but only about 5 feet deep in the center.  There was a little bit of scummy water in the middle of the pond.  It seemed like a strange design to build a little scummy pond right next to the house, like maybe the builder was concerned that we wouldn’t have enough mosquitoes without it.  Just beyond the pond was a lightly wooded hillside where the scummy water could have been drained to.  We all stood around and puzzled what the point of the pond was.

One of the shareholders looked at the whole scene and said it wasn’t what he had expected and he wanted out.  We reminded him that he could leave if he wanted, but the contract didn’t allow for any reimbursements.  I showed him a pill about the side of smoke detector and told him that the builder said we were to put it in the badwater pond.

We went inside the house and I admired the hardwood floors that were everywhere.  I noticed that there was a sluice gate at one end of the main floor that would allow water to be let into the house and fill to about four feet deep.  There was a second floor around the outsides that was open in the middle so that we could keep water in the lower part and have access to the lower part that was to be kept full of water and apparently keep fish in it.  It seemed strange to me that the builder had gone to so much trouble to put hardwood in an area that would be flooded, but then I thought about how old boats were traditionally made of wood, so maybe it made sense.