When I bought my house back in March, I knew it was a foreclosed fixer-upper and there were a lot of things that had deteriorated after years of neglect, but I’m a sculptor at heart, have worked in construction before, and love getting my hands dirty.
In the listings the pool looked like this;
Untitled by bradisdrab, on Flickr
either the previous owner started, or the leak drained it partway, because when I got to it it looked like this;
Note the giant tree, which I suspect was the cause of the cracks;
That and years of bad chemestry had left the plaster in pretty bad shape, a lot of bad staining, and softened corroded areas, especially around the cracks. The areas of blue/green aren’t paint, it was just eaten from the old/bad chemestry I think. That discolored plaster was softer and crumbly.;
So the first thing was the tree, it had to come out;
Sad to see such a cool old tree go, but there was no point to restoring the pool if the tree was just going to continue breaking it up.
I drained it, knocked out the old tiles, and got a better look at the damage. About half the coping had seperated from the bond beam, and some of the cracks went pretty deep, through the gunnite,
Then a couple rounds of pressure washing, my fiance got in on the action as well;
I’d started by hand, but got an air-chisel to chip out the old/bad/delaminated plaster, and open the areas around the cracks;
It took a few solid days to chip out;
After the worst of the plaster was removed and a couple rounds of pressure washing it looked like this;
But I could see that simple patching wasn’t going to cut it, a couple of the crack were pretty bad;
I’d come up with a plan to fix the cracks, but first I needed to finish preparing the rest.
( continued in part 2)
