Brooke here:

“If we’re not playing tonight, let’s grab some beers and drink them out by my broke-ass pool” – Brown, in email to the Lucky Bunch.

We are very excited about the broke-ass pool.  Not so much about the two weeks of backbreaking work that need to be done before the deck can be refinished, but it’s a pool.  Okay, admittedly right now it’s more of a pond hosting an uppity-zillion polywogs, but some day soon it will be a pool.

The pool is original to the house.  That’s a fact, but the rest of its history gets a little hazy.  Brown’s godfather Carl is an architect and he mentioned the pool was most likely done to resemble a Roman bath, as that was the style for pools in the 1960s.   The pool probably started life with a stained concrete deck, but someone decided to cover the concrete with bricks.  They did not do a very good job of it, and large sheets of bricks have broken loose from the mortar.  It’s more of a water hazard than a pool at this point.

We had Joe Barbagallo, a hardscape expert, come out and give us his opinion on the deck.  The best strategy is to rip up the bricks entirely and take the deck back down to the concrete, then proceed from there.  If the concrete slab is in good condition, an acid bath and an acrylic concrete covering will be all it needs to fix both cosmetic damage and weathering.  If it’s not. . . well, let’s just hope it is.  No one wants to pour a new concrete slab in the woods.

Brown and I are doing the grunt work ourselves.  Over the past week, we’ve started tearing up the bricks.  Brown rented a jackhammer and went to town; I’ve been chucking the broken discards and trying to save the undamaged bricks for future projects.

There’s . . . ugh.  Bricks are heavy, man.  This project is going to last at least another two weeks.  Any hopes of a Fourth of July housewarming with pool party have been crushed to smithereens.