“It looks like a shipwreck out there,” I said a month ago to our houseguests. Might as well speak the truth out loud, I figured. When a disaster lives in your backyard, there’s no hiding it.
But let’s go back to the beginning, so I can tell you the whole story.
During the summer of 2022, we limped through the process of making our pool swimmable. New to the house, we heard stories from the neighbors, and they told us no one had used our backyard water feature in a number of years. We waved away the situation. We would fix it up, we said, and I think the words no problem punctuated our replies.
Husband toiled away, de-mucking the slough like a champ. He scooped out rotten leaves for days. Next, he turned on the pump, but when it wouldn’t fire up for more than a few seconds, he came this close to buying a new one on the recommendation of two pool companies.
We phoned Dolf, our electrician, and he sleuthed out the situation, pinpointing the actual root of our troubles. He rewired the shed to power the pump to filter the pool to bring us the swimming experience we enjoyed last summer. The man didn’t look like a superhero, but he scaled the heights of our expectations all the same, and at the end of the story, he stood at the very top of our dreams, his cape flapping in the summer breezes.
A valuable truth I’ve learned from writers’ conferences over the years is this: good stories brim with seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Conflicts keep the plot rolling, the pages turning, see. And unfortunately, our swimming pool became a good story.
We opened our pool on July 6, 2022. Delights abounded; romantic notions of the pool were realized and all that.
Then we spied The Tear.
It started out as a little gash on either side of one of the jets. Husband patched the problem. But as our glorious summer ripped on, so did our pool liner. Our already short swim season screeched to a halt in early September because our swimming hole was losing water at an alarming pace–so alarming the people at Sparkle Pools said it would run us about $700/month to keep replacing the gallons that drained away. (I got the water bill for the summer months in November, though, and happily, they were wrong.)
We covered the sad pool with its shredded liner for the winter, but the leaks were so bad the water level sank lower than it should have. Husband slid boards under the tarp to support it, but the arctic winds of Minnesota during The Dark Months yanked it back and flung the supporting rocks and sandbags into the abyss.
In the spring of 2023, we ordered a new liner. The week before Memorial weekend, a new-to-us pool company came in, pulled away the old liner, and inspected the situation underneath it. Uh-oh. But no problem; it would only run us a couple thousand dollars to repair the walls and flooring and patch it with new concrete before installing the fresh liner. What choice did we have? The repair job done, the crew stretched the new vinyl inside the gaping maw.
Husband and I wondered aloud why we couldn’t just call the fire department to come with their big ol’ hose to take on the next step and fill the thing. Apparently, they don’t do that, so we did what the others do: we filled the new beaut with our garden hose over three days.
All final touches in place, we officially opened our pool yesterday, June 7, 2023–one month earlier than last year. And really, so far, so good.
Enjoy the below pictures to either brighten your day or serve as a cautionary tale to take into your hopefully-wiser-than-us future.
Photo 1: My Favorite Pool Boy (a.k.a. Husband) from the summer of 2022, vacuuming the thing. See what I circled, though? Yeah, yikes.
Photo 2: The post-winter shipwreck. *sigh*
Photo 3: The concrete repair work and Dicka, not too thrilled with it (but at least she had her iced coffee.)
Photo 4: The installation of the new liner.
Photo 5: The pool today, June 8, 2023.
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