The Swimming Pool Redux

I leaned back in my reclining armchair last weekend and said ""I don't think I will open the pool this year."'

Mrs Stevie, who had been listening for once immediately proposed a different plan, one in which I would open the pool and get ity done by July 4th, a mere four days hence.

"It would mean repairing the deck." I whined, manfully. "The whole thing is riddled with moss growths and it has huge holes in it now.¹"

Truth be told, I had been avoiding all such work for the previous year and most of this one, but Mrs Stevie made the lips of thinness and so nothing would suffice but that I decamp soonest for Home Despot where I could convert about $40 into three 12 foot lengths of pressure treated decking of meh quality² which I had cut into 4-foot boards in-store³ that I could cut with Mr Chopsaw to the exact 45-inch length needed on-site.

In the meantime I would have to pull off the cover and add more water, which would necessitate the usual Adventures in Plumbing.

I removed the leaf net from the cover and gagged at the stink of the rotted leaf mulch clinging to it, and set up the small pump to drain off the residual rainwater that had turned ominously green in the last week. It got some of it, but the pump needs depth to work well.

Removing the cover itself is always a trial as it often has a shallow depth of dirty water on it that pools as the cover is folded back, then usually manages to spill in the pool during the Herculean struggle to pull the last few feet of cover off, weighed as it is by about 5 gallons of dirty water now pooled into one place.

This year I decided to foil this inconveniant law of pool physics by leaving the small pump running while I tried to herd the water into it. This almost worked, but the pump was constantly clogging with what looked like cow manure slurry. This was composed of rotted leaves, water, guano from our fethered friends who obviously missed that old tree and dead insect juice. Eventually I got it to spill on the lawn and another bout of vomiting was induced. The water in the pool, for once, appeared clear, though there was a lot of organic detritus on the floor, dead spiders, some other insect husks and so forth.

I started to fill the pool before I removed the cover, and for once did not forget and end up flooding the garden. I dug out the pump and filter while this was going on, and attached all the hoses in fairly short order. I strapped the timer to the old bug-light pole I use for that purpose using zip ties and fired up the motor.

Which was seized solid.

In a rage born of the desire not to spend money on a new pump and effort trying to de-install the old one I grabbed the armature with my pliers and rotated it and subjected it to a barrage of some class one Words of Power until the bloody thing would turn freely. Then I turned it on again and Hey Pesto! Water circulation was happening.

Until the pump drank all the water in the skimmer and injested a lot of air. Obviously the pool needed more water, so I reconnected the water hose and went inside for a rest. When I came out again after an hour or so, the pool had overflowed, flooding the garden.

At least the pump now worked, so I could add the diatomacious earth so the filter could build itself. I was about to do that when I remembered that the filter needed a substrate on which to do that, and the cartidge was still in the shed. So I fixed that issue and was proudly watching the white soot of filtration suck through the pump when I realized I had not bled the air out of the filter cannister so nothing was happening.

I did the bonehead dance and twisted the bleed tap, and was soon rewarded with a slight drenching with pressurized cold water. Job done.

Or not. There was air leaking into the system. It took a while but I tracked it down to the seal on the lid of the leaf-extruder collander thingy. Damn! But wait! I bought two of these when the last one failed⁴ and it was hanging in a plastic bag from a rafter in the basement where it had been for Lo! these many years.

Or not. The bag was not there. I stomped over to my bench uttering some paint-blistering class fours, looked to my right and saw a plastic bag that had been hastily moved to allow access for either a plumber or phone engineer. In that bag was the lid! Oh happy day! My luck was obviously turning!

I'm not a fool. I did a thorough survey of the basement in order to spot any fires and sniffed deeply to identify any gas leaks that the anti-handyman demons had provoked so that entropy balancing would cough up the lid lest reality fracture, but there were no indications of a problem elsewhere to balance this amazing good luck.

In a trice⁵ I had replaced the lid and fired up the pump and begun the bucket chemistry needed to make the water acceptable for Mrs Stevie to float on aboard her inflatable bed. That done, I humped Mr Chopsaw out of the basement and put it in the kitchen to lessen the load tomorrow.

It nearlty killed me. Climbing the stairs I threw out my right knee, and the myserious shortness of breath nonsense I've had off and on now since COVID⁶ had me limping all over the kitchen wheezing like a busted pair of blacksmiths bellows, stifling my piteous moans manfully until Mrs Stevie yelled "SHUTTUP THAT BLASTED NOISE!" to raise my spirits.

It was too hot that day to do much more, so the boards stayed in the Steviemobile's trunk until mid-morning, when I stacked them against the house under the back porch to sweat out some of the water Home Despot treats them with.

The next day I got cracking and unscrewed the old boards and began lifting them out, anticipating about half a day of work, but the anti-handyman demons were waiting in ambush.

Once one board was up it was obvious that the joists had also rotted about a third of the way through and would not be safe to use even if they would take deck screws, which I seriously doubted. So another trip to Home Despot was undertaken and more money was converted into two straight-ish eight foot long two by fours that the nice man with the radial arm saw cut into four foot lengths for me.

Attempts to unscrew the old joists fell foul of years of rusting of screw heads, so it was back down the basement stairs to retrieve Mr Tigersaw⁷ and a few minutes after that I could climb under the deck frame, badly distorted from being tilted by the roots of the aforementioned tree, but still viable⁹.

For once, mounting new joists in the old places took only a modicum of class two Words of Power, hardly anything to write home about. Used up an evening's construction time though and I twisted my left ankle in the stuff hidden by ivy overgrowth under the deck.

I tossed some shock into the pool and left the filter running overnight and went to bed. The next morning the blasted motor was seized solid again and I realized the timer was an old, busted one that did not time.¹⁰ The blasted motor had run all night and overheated. I turned the motor off and let it cool.

I used Mr Chopsaw to cut the decking to length and Mr Tablesaw¹¹ to do some ripping-to-width for a couple of pieces that were of awkward size. A few screws and the job was done. Almost.

In order to satisfy the need to indicate the pool is not for public use and thereby avoid "attractive menace" lawsuits, and to get Diver Dan¹² to clean the pool without seeking out the ladder for hugs every five minutes, the apron of the original deck was hinged so the ladder could bw swung up our of the water, and I had to re-engineer that part as the original, upon inspection, was too far gone.

This required yet another trip to Home Despot where it proved impossible to find the one two by four by eight I would need among the collection of soaking wet, twisted knots they had pretending to be two by four by eights, so I relocated to Blowes where I found what I needed in a rack at arms length above my head, along with the "brass" hinges to replace the old "brass" hinges that had shed their faux brass finish and rusted solid.

As I was about to commence work, the air was pierced by the mechanical screech of Moving Parts About To Be Not Moving Anymore. "Cripes!" I yelled, as water began leaking everywhere. "The pump bearings have failed! This won't be cheap!"

And it wasn't. The Pool Place sold me a new pump and some fittings for a couple of hundred dollars and I was now presented with yet another two jobs: The removal of the old motor and pump, secured by well-rusted bolts, and the installation of the new one. I decided to finish the deck first.

It was a relatively painless process to assemble the apron parts, drill out the holes for the ladder poles using a holesaw I last used probably for that same job, what, 18 years ago, but I had to re-visit The Pool Place to turn more dollars into the plastic flanges that make the ladder look like it is properly installed¹³ because I could not find the spare set I had bought years before.

I was, of course home again before I realized said flanges did not come with the stainless steel screws needed to mount them to the deck, so it was off to Home Despot again to get them.

This time, due to sunburn, dehydration and general lack of the will to live, I made the grave mistake of letting Mrs Stevie accompany me, and so it was that a 20 minute trip to obtain screws became a 45 minute trip to obtain screws, a razorblade scraper¹⁴ and two bottles of glass cooker-top cleaner products¹⁵.

And soon enough the apron was installed, the ladder too and I could concentrate on replacing the pump and motor.

Getting the old motor off involved using my socket set¹⁶ to twist off one bolt, but it wouldn't grip the others so my new Dremel was deployed and demonstrated a faliure mode I've never seen before.

I used the new "quick fit" cutting disc/mandrel arrangement which has been spectaculalry successful in all the other jobs I've used them for, but this time so much heat built up while cutting I had two discs fail when the center drive boss parted company with the disc. I've never seen this happen before¹⁷, but it happened twice that day, forcing me to deploy Mr Tiger Saw to saw off the last two bolts.

Then, of course, I couldn't find any suitable bolts in the Basement Of Everything But The One Thing You Need so it was back to Home Despot to buy some. By the early evening I had the new pump installed, but it had an air leak I still have not cured. I did, however, find the new, working timer. So there's that.

The one remaining job was to install the horizontal stabilizer bars on the ladder, which requires getting into the pool, which was freezing cold. As I finished up, fireworks began exploding around the neighbourhood and I realized that it was July 4th.

Technically I had made the deadline.

1. The moss appeared first during COVID lockdown. I was puzzled because I had had the tree that used to shade the deck cut down for a variety of reasons, and suspected the moss was a by-product of bird activity which was now not so pool-proximate. I had no idea bbefore this that moss was corrosive to wood, but it is.↑
2. Home Despot has really lousy PT wood these days, twisted, full of knots and wringing wet, making getting some acceptable wood that people will want to look at and walk on without the fear of imminent plunging into the stuff under the deck a struggle and a royal pain in the arse.↑
3. they have a radial arm saw but won't let customers use it, dammit.↑
4. As told here.↑
5. Defined as about half an hour.↑
6. which has resisted cardiologists' and pulmonary specialists' efforts to find a cause for despite many tests.↑
7. A hand-held reciprocating saw that can be used any time finesse can be eschewed for maximum Nagasaki⁸ ↑
8. Damage so severe it cannot be undone.↑
9. I keep fantasizing about jacking up the other side of the deck with m' trusty trolley jack and repacking the underfill, but I'm getting old and all my joints hurt when I look at the job properly in the cold light of day. It would be an awesome urban engineering project, though.↑
10. Why I kept it when I replaced it is a mystery I can only put down to more perfidy by Mr Brain.↑
11. who lives in the basement. I had twisted up my left ankle while removing the old joists and now had no working lower limbs, making the staircase a bit of a challenge.↑
12. an automatic pool liner vacuum that wanders around the pool "randomly".↑
13. How little the bathers know me or my methods.↑
14. Which Mrs Stevie described as a straight razor, giving me a few nervous moments before I decoded her mad vocabulary.↑
15. New cooker, story to come if I feel like it↑
16. Stored in the basement, leg agony involved in moving it up the stairs↑
17. Usually the quick fit discs fail by shattering↑