Turn Left at the Broken Brick Pillar

I have to admit, that the house that we bought was actually my third favorite house that we looked at.

The house I really wanted was out of our price range. It sits on 10 beautiful fenced acres, offers a quite beautiful view of the country side, and had 2 garages and a barn. Alas, it needed too many repair to warrant overspending.

The second house was in a new subdivision. It was beautiful... Not enough yard or garage though.

And that takes us to the house we ended up buying. We looked at 10 houses in all, and we chose the one we bought right after we toured it.

The house we bought is wonderful and I love it very much. It is a lot of work keeping up 2 acres and the associated gardens and such, but normally it is a labor of love... But not yesterday. Yesterday, we tackled the pool.

The drated pool. The 24 foot above ground pond nestled right next to the house and deck. The drated pool, that was crystal clear when we signed the contract on the house, but was dark green when we moved in. The damn pool, that last year never would give in to being swimmable. The &%$#! pool that took 14 hours to empty and scrub yesterday.

Yes, 14 hours. The entire day. At 8:30 yesterday I started draining the water from it. With a pump that draws roughly 4000 gallons of water an hour, it should have taken about 3.5 hours to drain it; an hour to scrub and vacuum; and the water could have been turned on by 12, in time to shower up and make our planned 1pm trip to mom's. The day did not go according to plan.

At about 10:30, I saw that the pump was struggling to move water through the bushel of leaves that had got caught in it trap. So I stopped the pump and cleaned it out. It was the second such time I had done this, so I thought nothing of it. This time, I couldn't get the pump to prime, meaning I couldn't get it to pull water any longer. For the next three hours, we tried to get it to start pulling again, to no avail. Finally, after bucketing it out was ruled out as impractical, we decided to explore other opportunities. We started 3 hoses siphoning and set out to purchase a submersible pump.

By now Mom had arrived and we went to Wal-Mart in hopes that they would have one... No luck. We swung by the house in time to meet the kids, loaded them up and ran all the way to T-Town to go to Lowes, which had one. Ran home, grabbed dinner, nad dropped the pump in the water... It was 6:30, 22 inches of water left.

At 8:00 the little pump that could had drawn as much water out of the pool as it could, which left just under 3 inches of water in the pool, roughly 850 gallons. So, with a 16 gallons shop vac, I sucked out the rest. This entailed inserting the hose, waiting a few seconds for it to fill up, then turning the vacuum of, dumping it and repeating... Roughly 50 times.

When we finally got to the last 1/4 inch of water, we scrubbed the walls with bleach water, scrubbed the floors in the water that had come of the wall and vacuumed it dry... And clean.
Turned the hose on and put up the power tools.... It was 10:30.

Though I did most of the grunt work alone, I did have my thoughts to keep me company. In them I found a pearl of wisdom.... If you have enough money to have a pool, you have enough money to pay someone to take care of it for you.

This morning as the crystal clear water was filling my pool, I felt some satisfaction at a job well done, but couldn't help but wonder what else I could have done yesterday. I don't even like swimming that much.


Again, this document was spell check and any errors are the fault of the spell checker program and not the author.