How we turned a pond into a pool!
Ok…so it wasn’t really a pond, but it my as well have been! When we bought our house, the pool was the part that scared me the most. I mean, the whole house needed work, but the pool was a blackish green color and smelled like a sewer. I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. It was gross. It was the middle of summer when we purchased the house too, so the bugs and particularly the mosquito’s were out of control.
Depending on the light it looked black or green…you can see from the pictures above how bad it was…
I may not know a lot about pools, but I am pretty sure they are supposed to be a nice clear blue. We also had a ton of frogs living in the pool. If that doesn’t qualify it as a pond, I don’t know what does!
This is a view of the pool and backyard when we moved in. It was overgrown with a chain link fence around the pool. We have since taken the chain link fence down and cleaned up all the overgrown bushes and trees. We also took down the fort in the background. The backyard feels so much larger now without the chain link fence!
Next step was draining the pool.
I was dreading this part for sure. Because the pool was so dirty, we could not see the bottom, but we estimated it was about 8 feet deep. The pool is about 18 feet by 36 feet, so it is pretty large. That is a lot of dirty water, and it had to be drained somewhere. We rented a pump for about $20 from a local tool rental company one Saturday and decided to start draining it.
It was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I expected all that water to flood our neighborhood and have some very angry neighbors. Luckily, it did not flood the neighborhood, but it did smell pretty bad in the yard for a little bit.
I did not know what to expect as the pool started to empty, but this is what we found. Years and years of leaves turned into sludge. There was probably about 3 inches of sludge at the bottom. Fortunately the pool company we found to replace the liner said they would take the old one out, sludge and all. I cant tell you how happy I was to hear that. I am willing to roll my sleeves up and do just about anything, but cleaning this pool out is where I drew the line.
Real life moment: This is our dog Yoder. We turned our back for two minutes and came back to find him like this…do not worry, he got the bath of his life!
Our pool was a vinyl liner and you can measure and order a liner online and do it yourself. This was just one of those projects we did not want to tackle ourselves, so decided to sub it out. We found a local company and they were able to order the liner and get it installed in under two weeks.
New liner installed!
We had to fill it back up and that took about three days. We did turn the water off at night, so if we would have let it constantly run, it probably would have taken two days to fill.
After!!
This was an amazing transformation to watch unfold. This pool was so bad, we contemplated filling it in and not even dealing with it. In the end, I am so glad we decided to fix it up. Even though it is Fall and the water is freezing, we did get a little use out of it and it will be ready to go next summer!
View at night!
This was a new one for me, but totally worth it! The backyard looks so much better, smells better, and a lot less bugs! There is still a ton of work to be done on the yard, but this was a huge step forward and I am so happy the pond is gone and we now have a pool!
UPDATE:
We have now spent our first summer in the house with the pool complete! The backyard patio also got a makeover so if you want to read about that you can here.
We added the little sitting area with the lounge chairs from Lowe’s and I planted some lemon grass to help keep the mosquitoes down.
So far these lounge chairs from Lowe’s have held up very well. They are comfortable and sturdy and well priced from other chairs I have seen for the quality. The exact ones we purchased can be found online here.
One of my favorite photos from the summer! Our oldest daughter had a blast in the pool all summer and I cannot imagine going back to not having a pool! We also had our fair share of pool parties and lots of memories in this home. Not going to sugar coat it, the maintenance of the pool at first was a lot. After I got used to managing the upkeep it wasn’t so bad, but definitely took some getting used to if you are a first time pool owner like me!
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