Project #1 David's Pool

Project Day!!! This should be the easiest blogging day of my week every week! My life is nothing if not one big huge project. Truthfully though, cleaning alone is a pretty big project in Lisaland......possibly because I hate cleaning. Yes, it is the top three of my top five least favorite things to do in life. To me cleaning is right up there with root canals and colonoscopies. However, the irony of this whole I hate cleaning thing is....I will go a little over the edge if my house is not clean. So after the last few months that we have had, it should be no surprise to anyone that currently I am hanging over the edge and holding on by my fingernails. My house really needs cleaned. 

Two big projects that are not of the house cleaning nature that we are working on this summer are the basement room that we started last summer but lost momentum on and of course, the back yard. Hopefully neither of these will take up the entire summer (maybe just a couple of weeks) but in Lisaland....who knows what twists and turns may unexpectedly snake their way into my life?!

So first, the backyard. In the spring my backyard started out with a deck and a pool which was about 10 years old. After several attempts at trying to fill the pool after draining and cleaning it for the season, the pool would collapse in on itself each time after it had about a foot and a half of water in it. I decided that maybe the liner had shrunk since we drained it, so I was looking into getting a new liner. After each collapse, with help from some friends, the sides were straightened. As my luck seems to go though.....after the final straightening, a famous Kansas storm hit with it's famous gale force winds and by morning my pool had almost totally collapsed in on itself and was beyond repair.

After a lot of prayer, a disappointment or two and some really kind people, we were blessed with a new pool. This pool however is a different size and shape than the old pool, which is requiring both some ground and deck restructuring. The deck has to be taken partially to mostly (its a builders term) apart and reconfigured for the new pool shape. Then, when Z and I pulled the old pool down, it was quite obvious that the ground was in great need of some smoothing and delumping (yet another one of those terms). This required a bobcat to be brought in to tear out a good chunk of the yard and four tons of sand to be brought in so that the pool liner will lay on reasonably level ground. Luckily, I have two great guys who were willing to give up their evenings and weekends whenever possible to put the deck and pool together. Yes....I see that my future will include me baking quite a few cheesecakes in repayment for their generosity!

Like often happens in Kansas this time of year, or really any time of year...the weather becomes bi-polar and this last week the weather has out done itself. My backyard which already looked like an excavation project, now looks like a soggy excavation project. Yesterday was the first day that the muddy, sandy bog in my yard even had a chance to dry out. Hopefully work will now get back underway and progress can be made before mother nature has another psychotic episode.

As I said, right now it doesn't look like much back there, but soon.....very soon, David will have a pool for his physical therapy and I will have a place complete with lawn chair, umbrella and trashy novel to hide out from my housework. I think I may be more excited than even David is....and since the yard is torn up  Z, my creative genius had his mind going in overdrive. He spotted the little red pavers that had been a small path to the original pool some 30+ years ago. They had been dug up and discarded by the bobcat. He decided that we needed a fire pit area to make the yard fun both day and night, so now what was once a walkway is now being recycled or maybe up-cycled into a fire pit. Then.....a friend had a projector that they decided they no longer wanted. It can be hooked up to just about any electronic device, so we decided to do a Pinterest project and make a movie screen with pvc pipe and a king size sheet. Why stop there though? Why not add a horseshoe pit (after all....we do have 4 tons of sand and lots of leftover deck wood). What better time to implement such a great idea than when the yard is already torn to shreds????? BONUS.....when it is done, there will be almost no yard left to mow in the back!!! Could this be a better plan? Who needs a vacation when you have a cool back yard?

Yesterday evening. the posts went up for the deck and much to everyone's shock, the muddy back yard bog is already dry, hard and the dirt is cracking. With the deck posts re-situated and in place, it will be no time before the pool goes up. Then if I understand everyone correctly, they will go back in and finish putting the deck back together. Hopefully after all of that, then summer will be here for real and the temps will quickly warm the pool. We are so ready to get this summer in the pool started.

So there you have it....project #1....David's pool! As you can see I have thrown in a few pictures to see where we started and where we are at now. Next week I will catch you up on this project and hopefully be ready to introduce you to project #2. Until then......Happy Wednesday!!!!  Oh....and by the way, if you are elbow deep in a project of your own.....please feel free to share it with us in the comments section. I would love to hear about your project experiences!!!!