Spooky: a pool, a deck, and a cemetery?

We loved the pool in our backyard for about a year.

It really was puuuurfect to look at.

However, it was annoying to vacuum,  the chemicals were expensive, and it was a pain to balance at the beginning of the season. After the flood of 2009, all the water mysteriously drained out of it. We were stumped, but it solved the problem of having to cover it and winterize it.

The summer of 2010 we called to pool place to have them replace the liner and our 14,000 gallon disappearing water problem was solved… the sides were completely rusted through. I guess the liner had sprung a leak by rubbing against the sharp rusted out sides. They told us we could have the metal replaced and a new liner to the tune of $3,000…. negative.

So we I had a brilliant idea… walmart sells round pools, and they had one 20 feet in diameter (our opening was 24 foot). We could put it in the same place, there would be a little room on either side which would make it easier to put the winter cover on. It seemed perfect. And $2,500 less than the other option. We bought her, brought her home, set her up and filled her up. and THEN we noticed the broken filter. Long story short, we bought the pool at the beginning of June, and didn’t get the filter until the beginning of August…. we had to stir the water manually…. add the chemicals… stir some more… not.fun.at.all.

This summer we were over the pool. So what we should have done to begin with (and I take full responsibility for the dumb pool decision making), was get rid of it all together. But if we got rid of the pool, we had a huge 24 foot round hole in the middle of our deck.

Had a few estimates to replace the deck…
*The first one would cover over the existing one to avoid the labor of tearing it down (the structure was still very sound)- around $10,000  (Can you see the size of my eyes when I heard that????)
*We said no way, how can it be done cheaper?? They could fill in the hole- but doing that would still involve building from the ground up, making sure it was sound, etc… around $7,000…. I knew real quickly that we weren’t getting out of this without spending WAAAY more than I wanted.
*We brainstormed some more and a friend actually came up with the idea that we went with… Get rid of the 2nd layer all together. Keep the first layer (which you really can’t see in the picture) and extend it along the back of the house. Estimate for that?? Just at $4,000. I think I heard the hallelujah chorus…

Here she is on demo day week:

We actually sold all the wood to a man who was going to build a deck… so Josh tried to keep most of it intact… they loaded it up day after day for close to a week.

In this picture you can see where the old deck meets the new wood. They kept the old portion but stabilized it better.

And in 10 hours… and 4-5 men… this is what we had:

You can still see the old wood on the ground that hadn’t yet been hauled away. What a different a day makes!!

But not all our problems were solved… we were left with (AGAIN) a 24 foot wide hole in the ground… that is really tempting for a black lab and toddler to get into ALOT of trouble in.

We needed to find fill dirt, but really didn’t want to pay much for it… because we knew we needed alot. I posted on the online yard sale up here asking if anyone knew of anywhere to look… had a couple responses, but none led us to any dirt.

We asked around at church because surely SOMEONE would know. Sure enough someone said that the cemetary (that’s connectd to the church) dumps extra dirt in the back of the church… BINGO! This pile of dirt had literally been under our nose the whole time. And to make the story spooky, we did this the entire week leading up to halloween (totally not intentional though)…

So shovel-ful after shovel-ful and six truck loads later…. here she is all filled in. Gotta give hubs major props for working well past dark many nights to get this done. Yes a CAT would have made this a million times easier- but to each thier own right?

Although we’re pretty positive that it will be obvious for a while that there was a 24 foot pool in this area, we hope some grass will make it much less obvious.

and in a really high pitch squeal….. here’s some baaaaby grass!!

All in all we are very satisfied with this renovation. It feels great to be done AND PAID FOR!