Pool Party

Short post this week, but it’s heavy on pictures.

Diana and I had gone back and forth about what we were going to do for a pool this year and considered taking a loan out for an inground pool (along with some debt consolidation). We decided not to do a loan, in large part because it would have been additional debt that we didn’t want or need to take on just now. That meant no inground pool.

Instead we chose a 16 by 32 Intex above-ground pool from Amazon. We also decided that this time we’d make a concerted effort to level the pool. In the past, we usually just tried leveling the spot by hand. This time, we planned to have Number Two Son bring his boss’s skid-steer over to level the space. After all, who wants to shovel that much dirt by hand?

Nothing is ever easy, is it? Friday morning, he called and said his boss had sold the skid-steer on Thursday. We knew he was planning on selling it. We just thought we’d have another week or so.

Number Two Son said he’d talked to the local equipment rental store and they had a mini tracked skid-steer for $224/day.

I called the local equipment rental store again (I’d called them Thursday to reserve a plate compactor and a laser level), to add the mini-track to my reservation. They said they also had full-sized Bobcats for a dollar more per day…but those were all booked up.

Sigh.

So we picked everything up and came back to the house to start digging.

We spent all day Saturday moving more than a little bit of dirt, because of the grade of our back yard. That lip on the east edge of the space is about two feet. I had him dump a bunch of the dirt on the north edge of the pool to form a berm, too. There’s a fair slope from the north side of our lot that drops probably two feet from the property line to where the pool will sit, and when we get a good rain, a lot of water flows down that grade. I didn’t want all that water settling in under the pool and washing the ground out.

We knocked off around six or so, most because Number Two Son also needed to level his back yard for his pool. Even with the laser level, we didn’t quite get things as level as they needed to be. I think I’m going to call in the guy who did our driveway to finish the work. He’s got a Bobcat and he does good dirt work.

I’m pretty happy with what we got done though.

And no, of course I didn’t think to take a good “After” photo. Why would I do that?

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