DIY Sunday: Pool Repair

Last May I decided to replace the pool liner in my pool. The old liner was probably 20 years old, torn, and unrepairable. I contacted a pool company, and was quoted $7,500 to have the work completed. I decided I could probably do the work myself for much cheaper.



Here's a shot of what it looked like prior to starting the work. Gross!



I spent roughly 3 days repairing the dirt/prepping. It involved removing the giant tarp, ripping/cutting out the old liner, all the accumulated trash in the bottom (bricks, toys, sticks, dead leaves, all kinds of crap), and dropping a sump pump in and emptying out about 10,000 gallons of really smelly and disgusting rain water. After that I hauled out disgusting smelling sludge, bucketload by bucketload, which involved slipping in the mud a lot and getting covered in sludge myself. I also got a hell of a sunburn.



There is a sand/cement mixture that is supposed to sit on top of the georgia style red clay/dirt that's everywhere around here. Basically the goal was to make the surface as smooth as possible, and keep trash out, of course. Much of the work was down n dirty with a shovel and a trowel.

After this work was completed I measured the dimensions of the pool about 10 times (double triple quadruple quintuple check the measurements!!). Then I faxed the order sheet to the vinyl liner manufacturer and prayed it didn't rain before the liner arrived!



48 hours later the liner was delivered by a guy with a forklift truck. Next step was to unroll the new liner, which literally weighed about 450 lbs. During this step it is really important to make sure the liner is sitting in the hole properly, because once you start to fill it with water, it ain't going anywhere!! Water is super heavy and will make the liner sit VERY tight to the sides. Make sure its snapped in well too! The vinyl will stretch during filling so don't worry if it seems a half inch off here n there, because I can be adjusted...just not that much...



Filling it with the garden hose took forever. This involved making minute adjustments to the liner as it filled to prevent creases from forming. It took 8 hours just to fill it three feet; and about 48 hours to fill it in total. It is 8 feet total in depth at the deep end, and is 16'x36'. The pool holds around 23,000-25,000 gallons by my math (give or take a thousand).



Here's a shot of the pool after completion of the project. Total cost was around $1,500 and about 30 hours of physical labor. My water bill that month was only $50 more than it normally was, so I saved money by being patient and waiting for it to fill as well. Compared with the $7,500 quote from the pool guy, I saved rouchly $6,000 total. It was well worth it. With proper maintenance the new liner should last 10+ years.

Plus pools are fuckin fun!