Deanna's Dailies (or whenever...)

On June 1st residents of Brampton could be seen looking into the sky and pointing and saying"It's a bird....It's a plane....or a very big bathtub? Actually it was our pool "flying through the air" over our house. It was lifted from a flatbed truck with a crane and rather quickly lifted probably 100 feet into the air over the house. I was trying to record this momentous event with pictures but I had to be pretty quick with the shutter or I'd have missed alot of it. The crane operator (plus pool installers) lowered the pool onto one of the piles of sand close to the hole. The pool was placed in the hole and some water was even added and a bit of the sand was shovelled around it to secure it. One would've thought we'd have been done in just a few days after this but such was not the case.

Tim, the pool man, (no not Tim the Toolman from Home Improvement) took delivery of 5 pools at once so all of them had to get put in the ground before he could finish installing any of them. I must divulge the reason for the urgency for him to get the pools into the ground-70% of the total cost was due when the pool arrived on site. It is now June 16th and we're FINALLY getting close to finishing the installation. Our electrician was terrific with his work of running power from the house to the shed (This was after we once again used our shovels and dug a 50' long, 18" deep trench for the electrical conduit to be buried in). By the way, Glenn did that too. The plumbing of the pool is now complete. It was done once but one of the hoses came off one of the jets so it had to be dug up and reconnected. Now we're waiting for the patterned concrete to be formed and poured and our Solar Heater to be installed. I can't wait! Note the picture of the flying pool Bye for now.

Hi again. I need to post my picture to my blog if I want to then add it to my profile so here it is.

Now... to continue with "The Saga of the Pool". (There should probably be some soap opera type music playing here but I don't have any of that sort of music and I don't really know if you can add it to a blog anyway.)

A couple of weeks after we completed our digging the pool company employees FINALLY showed up. Because of all of the rain some of the clay soil of the walls of the hole had fallen into the hole. The water had to be removed and more digging had to be done. When they finished the extra digging, increasing the depth of the hole 3" below what we were told to dig they ordered a load of sand. Oops no driveway anymore and they even gave us a big 40 minutes notice. Fortunately we were able to arrange street parking for our vehicles for the night so we wouldn't get a ticket. We also have wonderful neighbours who insisted that we park our vehicles in their large driveway for the other few days that we couldn't gain access to ours. Eventually the sand was transferred from the driveway to piles surrounding the hole in our back yard. We no longer had a back yard between the hole plus piles of clay and sand around the hole. At this point my husband, Glenn, began referring to the back yard as "the desolation of Smaug"( the dragon in the Hobbit). Here's what it looked like. Unfortunately the yard looked this way for several weeks since there were delays in our pool being shipped from the U.S. And sooooooo....we had to wait! 'Bye for now.

Hi everyone. I've decided to chat about our most recent home renovation, an in-ground pool for our backyard. Wow! It sounded like such a terrific idea! The pool was supposed to be installed at the beginning of May so we'd be swimming nice and early this year. Ha! Ha!
Our first challenge was learning that we had to dig the hole ourselves since the required machines couldn't gain access to our backyard. The size of the pool is 10' x 20' (3 feet at the shallow end and 5 feet at the deep end). We'd already dug a hole for our backyard pond several summers ago so we decided to incorporate that space into our pool hole. Several weeks later and 3 dumpsters full of clay, rocks etc. we'd completed the task. .. or so we thought. (I'm not even going to mention the many muscles we suddenly felt that we'd never made acquaintance with before.) THEN...Our friendly neighbourhood pool man told us that we needed an extra 8 inches more all around the hole that we'd carefully dug to fit the template that HE'D given us. You can imagine how popular he was at our house! Right after we finally completed our digging "the rains came down" collapsing part of the hole and partially filling it with water. Here's a picture of the completed hole (prior to the rain). To get an idea of the size of the hole, that piece of plywood is 8 feet long by 4 feet wide!