Brooke here:

If I crane my neck in an uncomfortable way, I can see the pool from my office window; it no longer drives me to Irish up my tea (helpful hint: liquor-tea is an abomination).   Since the pool is the single largest project we’ve accomplished thus far, I thought it would be nice to collect all of the status shots for each phase.  Links to past blog posts on these topics are included.

When we first moved in, our friend Jo came over to check out the house.  He brought over his daughter, four-year-old Maggie, who peered over the edge of the pool and then backed away as fast as she could.  Jo asked Maggie if she’d like to go for a swim; young Maggie, an enthusiastic swimmer, wrapped her arms around her father’s legs and shouted “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Here’s the original post about brick removal at the Broke-ass Pool.

And a follow-up.

And a picture of me on top of several tons of bricks (our lives revolved around bricks for a good while there).

The previous shot came soon after we got sick of enormous estimates from pool repair people and decided to do the repair work ourselves.

We removed some of the trees surrounding the pool in the fall, and then took the winter off from pool repairs.  Zu fell in sometime around Thanksgiving, but otherwise it was just a big, watery hole in the ground until the thaw.

When we examined the pool in March, all of the work we had done on it the previous year had been torn apart by the winter.  We said screw it; we didn’t have the tools, the knowledge, or the experience to fix something this far gone ourselves.  I called a few more companies for estimates, and we ended up using the same company that had built the pool 50 years earlier.  This company typically handles wealthy clients, which we are not, so they had us on their back burner until mid-June but when they got going, they got going.

A post on the concrete tear-up and haul-off…

The same person who installed the tiles 50 years ago retiled the pool.  He said he remembers this pool as it was one of his first jobs when he was just starting out at eighteen.

Technically the entire pool should have been replastered at this step in the renovations, but we had limited funds and we elected to paint the pool for now and come back and replaster in several years.  Besides, you guys remember how I bought pool paint out of the back of a truck, right?  Sure would be a shame to let it go to waste.

Somewhere in this chaos, they replaced the pool filter.  Apparently the previous filter was designed for an above-ground vinyl pool half the size of this one.  Oh, you previous owners, you!  Such rapscallions!

One of my finds was four gallons of industrial-grade non-slip pool patio paint in the bargain bin at Home Depot.  Someone had placed a special order and hadn’t bothered to pick it up.  I grabbed them all for $25 in total and had them tinted to match the new concrete, then painted the gray concrete slabs.

I ran out of paint before I finished the entire deck.  Ooops.  Time to order four more gallons of that special order paint.  I’ll wait until next spring before I finish painting the concrete, though, so I can repair any winter weathering that might occur.

Technically we cheaped out on several large steps: the pool should have been replastered and the old, damaged concrete patio should have been redone or covered over with pavers, but there were budget restrictions so we’ve put those projects off for several years.  For the time being, we’re just so happy to be rid of the damned hellswamp!

And Maggie loves to come over to swim.