That may seem like an excessive level of detail for a dispute that could have been resolved by looking over the fence. But legal and practical certainty are not always identical. If Sandra eventually claimed a shared right, I wanted to be able to answer the claim with the survey rather than a gesture toward the yard. I had never paid a county filing fee for a right of access in her favor because no such right existed. I had never signed a co-ownership agreement because no one else had helped buy or construct the pool.
The installation documents were extensive. There was the contract, the drawings, the permit application, the permit approval, the inspection record, and photographs that showed the pool at every stage from excavation to its first fill. I included canceled checks and electronic transfers showing payments to the contractor. I added invoices for the filter equipment and fencing improvements, the final inspection certificate, and the photographs taken during the summer after installation when the water first turned that deep blue shade I had imagined for years.
I did not include every picture of people laughing beside the pool. Those were memories, not property records, and I wanted the distinction to remain clear. But I kept a photograph of my father sitting under the patio umbrella because it had been taken the day the pool opened, and I wanted it in the historical folder for reasons unrelated to Sandra.
For maintenance, I exported invoices from ClearWater Pool Care, added the water-treatment reports from recent months, and pulled my homeowner's insurance declarations. The annual costs were not insignificant. Even a swimming pool that functions properly requires money and attention, and a pool being used by unexpected groups requires still more. The extra chemical treatment Rosa recommended after the unexplained visits was modest compared with the pool's total cost, but it was not imaginary. I recorded the payments because they had been made and because the reason for those payments might later matter.
Then came the communication record. I exported the text messages I had exchanged with Sandra, preserving dates and full conversations rather than extracting only the lines favorable to me. Some of those messages showed me agreeing to visits. I kept them because they were part of the truth. If I had tried to remove every sign that I once welcomed the children, Sandra could fairly say the record concealed the origin of the arrangement. The important question was not whether I had ever given permission. I had. The question was what that permission covered and when it ended.
I wrote a short statement in my own words describing the original arrangement, its expansion, our September conversation, and my final refusal in April. I marked the portions based on memory and noted that no recording existed of those conversations. I also identified messages sent afterward that corroborated my position. The point was not to construct a perfect version of the past. The point was to make it difficult for either of us to confuse a favorable interpretation with the actual sequence of events.