The perils of home ownership

Some people wonder why I want to sell our house in Oklahoma and become a full time RVer. We have been planning to leave this Friday, July 7th, to spend a few weeks in South Dakota. About three weeks ago we discovered that we had a leak in the liner of the swimming pool that takes up the majority of our back yard. This had to be taken care of before we could even think about going off for an extended period.

The average life of a vinyl liner in one of these pools is normally around 10 years or so. We have lived here almost 18 years and the pool was approximately four or five years old when we bougth the place. That means the liner was around 23 years old. During this time we could only find one place that had been patched to fix a small leak, and that was before our time here. So, we probably have gotten our monies worth out of the liner.

We first attempted to find the leak with no results. During this time the pool was losing about a foot of water each 24 hour period. We pretty much kept a hose in the pool trying to keep up with the water lose. At the time we were experiencing heavy rains everyday but the water was still going out faster than it was going in. Finally we gave in and called a contractor to put in a new liner. At that point we gave up on keeping the water level up and just let it drop. That meant turning off the pump and filter which, we knew, would cause the pool to start turning green pretty quick. Due the rains the contractor was not able to get in at all last week and yesterday was the first chance he had to do the work.

They spent most of yesterday draining the pool and removing the old liner. Also, the previous owner had built the deck after the pool was in. He ran the deck boards right up to and under the top coping trim on the pool. Because of this the contractor had to cut out a four inch section of the deck on all areas where it was against the top of the coping to be able to stretch the liner down over the sidewalls. Next they stretched the new liner in and started refilling. When completely full this little pool holds 22,500 gallons of water. It is 28 feet in diameter and goes from 3 1/2 feet to 7 feet deep. The liner was cut out in pieces, rolled up and put in trash bags. There is now a large pile of trash bags in front of our house since tomorrow is trash pickup day. It took most of the afternoon and until around 10:00 pm last night to get the water level up to the bottom of the skimmer, where it was left until they could return and finish the job.

They returned around 10:00 am this morning and finished up redoing the top coping and cutting in the skimmer and return port. It took them about two hours today to finish the job. After they left I started up the hoses again, one from the back of the house and one pulled around from the front. About 5:00 this evening the level was up to where it should be and it now looks like we have a new pool. Still have to put the steps back in and get the chemicals up to par. Later I'll have to figure a way to fill the strips that were cut out of the deck around three sides of the pool.

As I said at the beginning we were scheduled to leave day after tommorrow to head north. That won't happen now since I've got at least a couple of days work left to do. Oh well, we have rescheduled everything and will now leave on Friday, July 13. Oh, the perils of home ownership.