Pool Saga 2011: Part Three

Two and a half weeks later I stopped by to check on the liner status and find out the liner is in and the work team had the order to put it in! Mike said the first step would be to drain it. I said "step one: done", you see a few weeks earlier I got a "nasty-gram" from the City of Norman over the "stagnant water" in my backyard. Clearly they did not see the rips in the corners and realize that I must have been in the process of getting a new liner, so I just drained the thing, again. The bad part was that about a week after I drained it we had a HUGE rain storm and it filled the dang thing up about halfway in the deep end, so I got to drain it again.

I was in the midst of Oklahoma United Methodist Annual Conference (there will be a blog about this eventually so swimming wasn't a priority. I snapped some pictures before the liner installation began:

the little problem

the big problem

from the east

from the west

So now we see the problem, right? That was June 1. On June 2 I came home and found the pool looking like this:

Naked pool!

Clearly I was not aware of all the things that go into replacing a pool liner. I have now figured it out, somewhat. Step one, drain pool. Step two, remove old liner. Step three, fill in any holes and whatnot. So that was Thursday. It stayed like that forever and forever and forever (or until Tuesday).

What I have forgotten to mention is that garden gnomes were doing all of this! Until the very last day I never saw a human doing anything and they were very sneaky about it! (I am by no means complaining, it was just really funny.)

I came home Tuesday at lunch thinking about spray in bed liners (hehe) and walked in, thinking no one had been in my backyard and saw this:

There's a liner in my pool! There's a liner in my pool!

This is the vacuum that has to run to pull the air out from behind the liner while it fills (who knew?).

Notice anything wrong here? Yeah nothing was cut out. I didn't think about that, I guess

I just assumed it would come all ready and cut, but I was wrong!

This was about 11:30 am on Tuesday! There's water! The gnomes strike again!

Onto Wednesday! I got a little nervous because the water level was rising and the light under the diving board was hiding behind the liner. Wasn't so sure about that. So here are Wednesday's pictures:

Light cut out! (sorry for the wretched picture, my phone wasn't playing friendly)

Stairs cut out!

Almost finished! All that was left at this point was to cut out the skimmer and the jets.

By Thursday everything was cut out, again the gnomes struck. It had about a foot and a half of water to go when I went to bed. Friday morning, when I woke up with a migraine and had been up half the night with an earache (I now understand why little kids are so upset when they have earaches, it HURT!) I turned the water off because it was about to overflow and went back to sleep. I was woken up around 2:00 by the garden gnomes! They do exist! They got everything all going and put the chemicals in. After that it was a little foggy from the stabilizer, so I did not take pictures, but here is the finished product:

All ready for swimming! (Now just to get the house acceptable for guests!)

Hopefully there won't be a part four of the saga and I'll have a nice easy pool season along with an easy closing come this fall. One can hope. I will say that I managed to miss cottonwood season, but the pool is now open in the middle of what I like to call "grapenut season". I call it this as there are little seed thingys that fall off the trees in my backyard and when they accumulate they look like Grapenuts cereal. Those are the only two seasons I can think of from last year, until the leaves a-fallin season. :)

It is a little dirty and needs to vacuum, but apparently a guy's version of "do not overtighten" on the pump basket and a girl's version are very different, so I can't get it open myself and need a guy to come and help me (accepting offers!). I think there's a dead frog stuck in there (I've fished two out and there was one in the skimmer that I'm afraid went down the skimmer...oops). I laid out today and am a nice pretty bright pink, which is a color better than white, so we're making progress on the tan of 2011!