My wife insisted we get a house with a pool when we moved to Houston. She said there was no way she was going to live in a place this hot and humid without a refuge to flee to.
It's been nice to have the pool, but I've found that we don't use it enough to justify its cost. Turns out my wife doesn't even really like to swim. Getting in the pool to her means getting into one of those blow-up floaty chairs, and floating on top of the water while reading a book.
She told me that she doesn't like to go under water or get water on her face and hair. Seems weird for someone who insisted that we needed a pool at our house. I guess you aren't allowed to float like that at the community pool, so...
Anyhow, it's time for us to bear the brunt of yet another cost of having a pool. Every so often, your pool needs to be resurfaced. Depending on what you use to surface it with, it can be as low as five years or as many as fifteen years. I don't know how long it was before we moved into our house since the previous owners resurfaced it, but I'd guess it's been a really long time.
For once, my wife didn't want to do this ourselves. We contracted a company to come in and take care of it for us. It was a strange process, though. I mean, not really, but it felt strange to me. It was weird to see our pool in the state it was in for a few days.
The first day, they showed up and started draining the pool. I guess that can be a dicey thing. If you don't do it right, the water in the soil can cause the pool to pop out of the ground, completely ruining it. I guess the way they avoid that is by drilling two holes in the bottom of the pool for any ground water to rise up through.
They didn't even come first thing in the morning, but by noon, as I left for work, the whole thing was basically empty.
The next morning, the pool looked completely different.
The little guy just couldn't resist getting into the pool and playing around in it. We had a hard time keeping him out of there. He wanted to get in and run around every chance he could get, but we didn't know whether we were supposed to stay off or not.
The next day, they were in there putting on the real stuff.
This time they did start early. At the absolute crack of dawn, my wife and I had to move all the cars out of the driveway so they could get access to the backyard. But by 11:00 AM they were all done.
I was a little worried that they had forgotten to put the little sparkly bits into the mix. My wife had specifically requested them, little chunks of what looked like abalone shell mixed into the pebbly look of the finish. I texted the pool guy, and he assured me they were there. It didn't look like it yet because the finish hadn't been washed or polished yet. They were letting it cure right now, and once they started filling it with water, we'd really start to see it.
They left it for two days before coming in to finish it off. It was really hard to keep Little out of that thing during that time. He was thinking he had his own personal skate park in his backyard. He doesn't even skate, but he wanted to get in and run around as if he were riding a skateboard.
Eventually, they came in and started filling the pool.
This time, it wasn't fast. They didn't have a fire hose or anything to fill the pool with water as fast as they took it out. Instead, they hooked some thing onto he end of our garden hose, and turned it on.
We were warned not to turn it off at all. If they water didn't keep rising, it would leave marks on the side at whatever level it stopped at. So we made sure not to touch it.
My wife couldn't stop going on about how much she loved the new, darker blue color of the water.
She would frequently go to the back window, look out and gush about how beautiful the color of the water was.
I think it took more than 24 hours, but the pool finally reached the level it was supposed to be at, and we could turn off the hose.
Then the pool guy started treating the water. I guess that thing they put on the garden hose had some preliminary chemicals to get the water going in the direction it needed to go to one day be suitable swimming pool water, but he dumped several more bottles of chemicals into the water to optimize it.
My wife freaked out and called me at work when she came home one night and the beautiful blue water had turned a sickly green.
"What did they do to my blue water?" she griped.
I had no answer for her. It had been that enchanting deep blue when I'd left for work. Something had happened in the interim. The pool guy later told me that the color had gone green after he'd dumped a bottle of acid into the water. I don't know which acid he dumped in, there's several that you use in balancing pool water.
Luckily it didn't last long. By the next day the water was already getting better, and the pool guy kept coming back and adjusting things again and again over the next week.
The last part of the pool refinish was the mastic. That's the seal that goes around the bricks. You can see how bad it was in the picture of the green water up above. Here, let me put in a close up of the spot I'm talking about.
See that line that is supposed to go between the patio and the bricks? See how most of it is all rotted away and missing? That's the last thing we needed fixed.
A guy came on Thursday as I was leaving for work, and cleaned that all up and replaced it for us. The pool guy texted me the pictures of the finished product.
It looked so much better now.
He also texted me a warning to stay off of it until it finished drying.
Oh no! Little had been desperate to get in the pool since they filled it back up, and the pool guy had told me that the water was finally properly balanced and was safe to get into. When I'd told Little that morning, he had sworn that he was going to get in the pool as soon as he got home from school, which was about exactly the time that I got that text.
I quickly texted my daughter.
She said she was still on the bus, not home yet, and that I'd better try calling him on the Alexa. I did, but calling an Alexa doesn't work well if the person you're trying to contact isn't in the room with the device. I called for Little, but he never responded. Eventually, I got another text from my daughter.
I furiously typed a message to her, insisting that she get him out and make sure he didn't step on the bricks on the way out. I could only hope that he didn't get any of the stuff on him and track it all over the place. I could imagine it being all over the patio, or worse, stuck to the side of our brand new pool surface, making it look bad instead of so beautiful that my wife would swoon over it.
Turns out, however, that we lucked out. Either it was already dry enough, or he never stepped on it, because there is no place anywhere that I can detect any smudges or messes at all.
So, now the pool is all finished, and we're ready for our first plunge.
And it couldn't have come at a better time. The weather had turned bitterly hot at the start of May. We were flirting with record temperatures every day. We all wanted a chance to swim in that pristine blue water, and now we finally could.
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