Terre Haute House Repair - The Pool

We have a 40' x 20' inground pool that is 8' deep at the deepest to 3' at the shallow end. This means the pool contains around 35,000 gallons of water. We use it all the time and apprciate just diving into it at the end of a long hot day. We let out friends and their families use it and only have a couple of rules - no glass anywhwere near it and no children are to swim on their own - we don't like the idea of coming home from work to find one of our friend's children lying face down in it!

The pool was originally installed around 1970 and has had two new liners in the last 25 years.

My brother-in-law and his children, Hollie and Billie, enjoying the pool in August 2008

The Pool House - 17th August 2009

Now and then we get small holes appearing the liner which are usually easily repaired using waterproof glue and a plastic patch. The liner was last replaced around 2000 and it thought it was nearly time to have it replaced again but events overtook us.

We closed the pool as normal in October 2009. After a couple of weeks we noticed that the pool cover was lying a bit stangely so lifted a corner of it up and found we'd lost a lot of water. The winter of 2009/2010 wasn't very nice being very cold and wet, and frozen rainwater was lying on most of the pool cover even though we tried to pump it off before it froze. This water meant we couldn't get the pool cover off to inspect the pool properly. A couple of weeks later part of the pool cover fell into the pool.

We'd heard stories of people's pool sides collapsing when the pool was emptied - the weight of water helps to keep the sides in place - and we were hoping it wouldn't happen to us, but I guess were arn't that lucky. In April 20010, we pulled the cover off of the pool and found it nearly empty, not only that but both long sides were very warped.

We phoned round and got some quotes to repair the pool. One company said they'd do it for $40,000 and what they'd do is leave the pool as it was and put a new, smaller pool inside the old one. We didn't like that idea at all and in the end Sparkle Pools of Terre Haute said they'd do the job for $25,000. I was a bit disappointed - I was hoping for less than $10,000, but then I've no experience with building pools at all.

In June 2010, they cut the old liner away and found that the pool was ready to collapse anyway. The termites that had caused so many problems to our house in 2009 had also eaten away part of the wooden walls of the pool.

Removing the pool sides and concrete pool surround - June 27th, 2010

The sad remains of our diving board bolts - June 27th, 2010

Digging out the sides of the pool - July 27th, 2010

The old, rotten pool siding - June 27th, 2010

A general view of the reconstruction work - June 27th, 2010

View of the reconstruction from the roof of our house - July 3rd, 2010
The new pool siding can be seen in the top right

This page created 5th July 2010, last modified 11th July 2010