Setting Up A Pool, Our Way

Finally, a post not about EDC, Reviews, River, or things like that, this one is just about setting up a pool. Simple right? Hah, you have not been around our house then. For those of you who don't know, we're crazy, and by we I mean my family. We don't just do something half way, in fact we do more than is necessary just because we can. Our backyard has a decent slope to it, something along the lines of about 20 degrees or so on average, this is not a good slope to have for a pool. Our answer?

A GIANT BOX!
Well, sort of. We built a 20'x20' box in our backyard anchoring 6"x6" posts 3' in the ground to take the weight with 4"x4" posts 3' in the ground towards the side with less weight. We also lined it with landscaping material to cover the cracks. The cap is made up of 10' sections of 2"x8" lumber cut to fit so this is quite strong (and also heavy, the entire thing is made of pressure treated wood). We ended up with 12" above ground on the shallow side and 26" on the deep side.

Of course it's not really a project until we get this thing involved, we have this and another bobcat forklift making special guest appearances and frightening the neighbors quite regularly. We do not own either of the bobcats but a good contractor friend does so every once in awhile he will stop by. You may be wondering why we need a 6000lb piece of equipment to put up a pool...

...like I said, we go all out on projects. This is the remainder of 30 yards of fill sand (3 Full size dump trucks) that we had after about 3 hours of work. We used the bobcat to carry the sand from the street to the box then moved it to fill the box by hand (that sucked). In the end we had around 10 yards or so extra that we dumped around our fire pit and spread around the back yard to level some low spots out. There is one section that has about 4 yards of sand that we just piled up because it was after dark and we did not feel like doing anything else so we just dumped it under a tree to figure out something to do with it later.

To all those little kids when I was growing up who joked about having a bigger sandbox than me: Where is your sandbox now, huh? That's right, I buried it in my sandbox! Ok, now that's out of the way. Filling and leveling this box took a complete day with 4 people and a bobcat, construction of the box itself took 2 two days of on and off work, and setting up everything after it was all done took about 2 hours. Four days and we have ourselves a personal beach.

Heatstroke did set in because we were all a little loopy after filling and leveling the sand, so I decided it was probably a good time to head inside and get a drink, that didn't happen. I ended up moving some more sand and then moving the cars so we weren't blocking the neighbors houses, then I got a shower. Finally after that I got a drink:

It just looks delicious, I LOVE root beer, that and Dr. Pepper. Every time I go to Red Robin I get the endless root beer floats and drink like three of them. I decided against a float today and just drank a cold root beer but it hit the spot after working all day. Today we got the pool set up and it's currently filling up with water:

And of course the neighbors have to come see what we've built, again. We can't just "set a pool up", we have to go all out, but hey, it works.