Pool Removal

This wasn't an overly hard job, but there were some things about it that were unexpected. The first thing I did was go around the pool with a pick-ax, jabbing holes into the lower part of it. As you can see here, it was leaking like a sieve around the bottom. It drained that way for almost two days.

After that I went around the whole thing with my cordless drill, unscrewing the multitude of screws that held it together. That left me with several posts, the post caps, the top lip/edge that went around the whole pool, the 4' tall outside ring, and the inside rubber liner. All but the last of those were metal.

 The 4' outside ring I cut into sections, then folded up like an accordian. It made 7 or 8 large heavy pieces. I ended up taking all the metal down to the metal collectors. As it turns out, a large portion of it was aluminum; I ended up getting around $70 for the scrap metal.

The inside rubber liner I cut up into small pieces, and threw away in trash bags. This thing was really gross and slimy on the inside.

That left me with a large sand circle in the middle of the yard, with a rock bed surrounding it. The large amount of sand ended up being a rather fortuitous find, as I needed a bunch of sand to make a proper base for some retaining walls I wanted to build. I laid down a tarp in the back corner of the yard, then moved all the sand into a large pile on top of it. You'll see the retaining wall building in a future blog post.

Next I had to get all of the landscaping rocks out of the middle of the yard. There was a 2' ring, all the way around the pool. It was 3" to 4" deep all the way around, and was completely saturated with dirt, weeds, and grass. That's what happens when you leave landscaping unkept for decades. I dug it all up, and sifted it with a rake sifter. This was really hard and unpleasant work, and it took forever. I highly recommend building a box sifter if you ever have to do this kind of thing, that's what I later did.  The rock I used as landscaping in other places, as you'll see in a future blog post.

The last step was to fill the low spot in the yard with dirt. I took my old pick up truck down to the local land scaping store, and had them dump dirt right into the back of it. Then I backed up the truck to where the dirt was needed, and shoveled it out. It took 2 1/2 yards of screened black dirt, which cost around $14 per yard. The truck left big ruts in the yard that also had to be filled.

I seeded the spot several times with grass seed. I don't believe in watering the lawn, so I never did that. Here's how it looks today.

 That's it for the pool removal. By far the worst part of the job was sifting the rocks out of the dirt and weeds. It would have been a real hassle if I wouldn't have had a good use for the sand that was there, fortunately that one worked out.