The Saga of My Pool

Let me start off with some history of our pool.......

It is a smallish inground oval pool that was already here when we bought our house 8 years ago. It is about 3.5ft deep on the shallow end, and maybe 5.5ft deep on the deeper end. Nothing fancy, but we thought it was awesome (at first). We thought we could have all our friends over for cookouts and barbecues and spend the summers lounging poolside and enjoying the sun.

Evidently our friends thought differently--people rarely came over, and very seldom did they want to swim. On the occasional summer birthday we could coax people to get in but it mainly ended up being just us swimming quietly together on really hot days. Oh and that fantasy about spending the summer poolside? No, I forgot about life, chores, sunburns, and a pesky little thing called a full time job that got in the way of that.

Mainly we felt like we were spending more time cleaning it and maintaining it than we actually were getting in it! Half the time the water was too cold to be enjoyable. Being in the ground it is insulated so the temperature takes a lot longer to go up in the summer, and it is in the shade half of the day.

After we had Brad our appreciation for the entertainment of the pool was slightly renewed. Now we had a third person who had to swim with us (whether he wanted to or not!) and cool off on the hot days. He loves getting in the water and splashing around.

Then the problems start.....first a friend used the pool ladder and the steps broke so we had to replace that. Then about 3 summers ago our jets kept shooting out sand from the filter every time we turned the pump on. After looking into it, we found that meant the filter is going out and needed to be replaced. After a few estimates from repair places that were ABOVE the $1000 mark, we decided to look into doing it ourselves! We found a new filter that was even better than the one we had and Nick managed to get it in all by himself for around $400.

The next year our pump was giving us issues....so Nick took that apart and rebuilt it himself and replaced all of the old gaskets and whatnot that had worn out over time. Last year when we opened the pool for the summer, we discovered that a large section of the vinyl liner had come out of it's track on the edge. We tried to stick it back in but could never get it to stay. We could still enjoy the pool so we didn't worry too much about it.

This year we waited later than usual to open the pool since we went on our Europe trip. About a week into June we finally took the cover off and found that the first section of liner that came out had grown to be around a 5ft section, and another spot on the other end of the pool about 2 feet long had come out as well! The large section was actually drooping down in the water. We stopped right there and knew we couldn't do anything further with the pool until someone came out to (hopefully) fix it.

Being the summer time, of course all of the pool repair places are full with customers. We managed to find one that made it to our house in about a week, but were disappointed to hear that it looked like our liner was too far gone and too shrunk from age to be restretched back into the track. We needed a new liner! Grrr....

We immediately began calling around for quotes on a new liner. The prices we were hearing were averaging around $3000. It did cross my mind to do it ourselves--a new liner is about $400 plus the little odds and ends. I watched a Youtube video and that squashed any hope of doing it ourselves. Too big and too hard! Nick finally found a guy who could come out the next day and had the best rate of anyone.  We told him let's do it!

So here we are....he came out yesterday to drain the pool.

Today he came out with a helper to take out the old vinyl and do measurements to order the new liner. You can see the tree roots growing in from our neighbor's tree....the pool guy said that's not a big deal and it will get taken care of.

He is ordering the new liner today and it should come in about a week. Here is the design we picked out:

We are taking this opportunity to fix the light in the pool. It went out a couple of years ago and we never wanted to drain the pool just to fix it. Gotta look at the bright side, right??

In the back of my mind I knew this was coming. Our house was built in 1979 and I'm sure this pool (as well as our deck and broken hot tub) was put in shortly after. We rebuilt the deck last year (and are chunking the hot tub this year). I'm also expecting the air conditioners to go out at some point too, but hopefully it's well after we have sold the house!

The moral of the story is: When you have never had a pool, it seems like an awesome amazing thing to have. Until you have it. Then you realize the hard work, time, and money that goes into maintaining it and keeping it simply functional. For something that you can really only enjoy a good 3 months of the year, I'm gonna say it's not worth it and we will definitely NOT be getting another house with a pool in it! Hopefully the next owners of our house will enjoy it more than we have, and be thankfully that we went through all of the trouble of turning it into basically a brand new pool.