From green to clean...

I'm convinced my staph infection came from my recent pool cleaning experience, and although I wore gloves the majority of the time, I did catch myself a few times with my hands in this disgusting water, I present exhibit A: Disgusting, I know. How does a pool get so gross you ask? That's simple - Stop spending hours every week and hundreds of dollars in chemicals a month. Easy as that.

You see, since the day we moved into this house the pool has been consuming. Sure, we swam in it all summer last year but what it took to keep it clean was out of control. We knew we had to drain it and start over (and have someone else take care of the chemical portion entirely), but that is not something you can do in the middle of the summer, it will ruin your pool. We instead had to wait until the weather cooled significantly. But we were done dumping chemicals in - so we stopped. And that's how we ended up with exhibit A.

We had a small pump to remove all the water. This took far longer than I ever anticipated and after a long week, we were only this far, exhibit b: At this stage in the game I realized a huge error on my part; I wasn't using the right hosing on the pump. The hose we were using kept collapsing which made the process much longer than it should've been. I hate when I read the instructions and still mess up!

But I'm good at correcting and within no time I had it emptied.

With 16 gallons of liquid chlorine, I gave the whole thing a nice scrub. Twice. I was going to make sure the algae was gone for good. Steve was in town for the second scrub and it's amazing how fast the process goes when there are two people working on it. The kids thought it was so cool to be in the pool without any water. Bennett was my partner in crime for the majority of the process and aside from bleaching one of his brand new shirts, (what mother puts her son in a brand new shirt on pool cleaning day??) I'm happy to report no injuries! The day I started filling the pool I was patting myself on the back. It took a little longer than scheduled (most of my projects do) but watching the water fill to the top and still being able to see the bottom was a miracle. In all reality we should've replastered the whole thing. There's so many spots that have bubbled and cracked off over the years, but we just couldn't do it right now. Our resources are being directed at several things right now and it's just not good timing. We're adding it to the constantly growing, "When we don't have to pay tuition anymore" list. It's full and it's ready. And even better - it's now a salt pool. There's a local company that will install a system for free at your residence as long as you carry a chemical service with them. It's their equipment and their problem and it's less expensive than the chemical service we originally looked into: less green hair, and I won't break out in rash when I enter it. We're pretty happy in these parts.