What we thought was “pretty good” in our pool status paled in comparison to the real thing.
Yes, we finally got the money organized to get a new dirt catcher and filter. (Check out the before and after photos in the blog. It’s really astonishing.) Combined with two rounds of chlorine; running the pool pump with its new filter for forty-eight hours; and a last vacuuming to suck up the remaining bits of grit and leaves on the bottom – voila – a gorgeous pool.
The pool, with its sparkling blue water, looked like an ad for Florida, tempting us to leap in and relax on pool floats with a drink in our hands (picture tiny umbrellas and little chunks of fruit in the drink).
The bad news? We were thoroughly entrenched in a lengthy unseasonable cold spell, and being in the pool was the last place we wanted to be. We had hopes, however, that the weather would change soon. Meantime, Alex scheduled his second annual Eggs n’ Kegs party for St. Patrick’s Day, a month away.
Then the pool started turning cloudy again. We’d returned some things to Home Depot and had gotten a store credit, which we immediately traded for a leaf basket and a pool vacuum, but our new vacuum wasn’t vacuuming up the grit. Discouraged, we let it go for a few weeks, thinking it through – we were so busy with other things we didn’t have time anyway.
By the time March 17th was nearly on our doorstep, we had to take action. We could not have a pool party without a swimmable pool. My best guess was that we had a clog somewhere in the pipes, so we carefully looked at the likely possibilities. I zeroed in one section of pipe, which we might be able to take apart.
Too insecure to do it without help, we fired off an email to Mike and Terry at the Delray Pinch A Penny pool store, our lifelines and partners in our pool project. We sent off pictures, followed up with a phone call. Chelsea took careful notes as Mike walked her through the process, step by step.
Success was ours within the hour – we carefully cleaned out the pipe joint and reassembled it. It was so horribly clogged with leaves and debris that it was astonishing that we had any water flow at all. After the cleaning, we vacuumed again, and had to do another filter cleaning, finishing at 6 p.m. on March 16th.
We couldn’t resist tossing the pool floats in the water for St. Pat’s Day, though we figured it was still too cold for anyone to swim. It was, but that didn’t keep people out of the pool.
All that work, over all those months, was so well worth that feeling of success!
I can’t finish the pool saga without giving credit to Mike and his wife Terry at Pinch A Penny in Delray. We’d been so discouraged with the other store – I haven’t been so annoyed in a long time. Both Mike and Terry are unfailingly upbeat, and always gave us the lowest-budget option when they could have sold more product by suggesting something else.
When everything started working so well, with so little cash output compared to that “other” store, we knew we’d be loyal to them forever. We got to where we liked going in to the store just because we could always count on clowning around with them a bit – we never once left without a good laugh.
There’s even more – we had a spa vacuum that broke about four years ago, just a little piece, but the darn thing was useless without that piece. Trying to get sand out of the bottom of the spa is virtually impossible without draining the whole spa. On a whim, we brought the piece into Mike and asked if he had any ideas besides a whole new vacuum (a fifty-dollar outlay, minimum).
Mike looked at it and said, “Just leave it with me and let me think about it.” About two weeks later we got an email from Mike saying “Come and get it!” Much to our amusement and delight, Mike had carefully glued pieces of a pink plastic Q-tip stick in place of the broken part.
But does it work? Indeed it does. I couldn’t end the pool story without checking to be sure, so Chelsea just now cleaned the sand out of the hot tub easily, with our repaired spa vacuum. How can you not love people like Mike and Terry? Meeting them was an awesome result of our months-long pool challenge. Be sure to check out our photo gallery to see them, and to see the pool progress.