Pool Project

We bought our house in February, almost seven years ago. We were first time home buyers that were a little naive. We bought our house knowing that there was a pool but we didn't really look at it and figured that we would just fill it in eventually. Well in the spring we uncovered it and it looked like this...

Ugh. It was gross. Filled with old, rotting leaves and the paint was peeling. But my ever ambitious husband decided that he would clean it, sand blast it and repaint it with pool epoxy. I, of course, went along for the ride.

We started out with a small air compressor to drive the sandblaster. Well it worked but VERY slowly. You can see it in the above picture. So we had to rent a much larger compressor.

This picture shows the new compressor and Jim's dad who came to help us out with our crazy endeavor.

So we solved the problem of the too small compressor. But then we had the dust problem. It created this could of blue dust that traveled everywhere including our neighbor's yard. They were very understanding but were having a graduation party in their backyard the next day and were worried about having a layer of blue dust all over everything. So we tried to contain the dust a little by covering the pool with a tarp.
It wasn't too bad but it also trapped a lot of heat. I failed to mention that this was in June and it was about 85 degrees which isn't all that bad except you had to wear jeans, a long sleeve shirt, and a full face mask to prevent the sand from abrading your skin.
Here we are making progress. The white part is the old paint. The brown part is the exposed concrete. You can also see all the sand that collected at the bottom of the pool. When we were done sandblasting we had to haul all that sand out. Another back breaking part of this project...
Jim taking a well-deserved break...
The pool cleaned and ready to be painted.

Here's me painting the pool. We did it at night to avoid the heat but there was the added problem of bugs which were attracted to the light.
The painted pool waiting for water. Looking back on this project I forget how much work it was but I'm glad that we didn't just fill it in. We use it quite a bit during the summer and will probably use it more and more as the kids get older.