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;
GOPR1748 by bradisdrab, on Flickr

Note the giant tree, which I suspect was the cause of the cracks;

GOPR1595 by bradisdrab, on Flickr

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.;

Untitled by bradisdrab, on Flickr

So the first thing was the tree, it had to come out;
Untitled by bradisdrab, on Flickr

Untitled by bradisdrab, on Flickr

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,

Untitled by bradisdrab, on Flickr

Then a couple rounds of pressure washing, my fiance got in on the action as well;
Untitled by bradisdrab, on Flickr

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;
Untitled by bradisdrab, on Flickr

It took a few solid days to chip out;
Untitled by bradisdrab, on Flickr

After the worst of the plaster was removed and a couple rounds of pressure washing it looked like this;
Untitled by bradisdrab, on Flickr

But I could see that simple patching wasn’t going to cut it, a couple of the crack were pretty bad;
Untitled by bradisdrab, on Flickr

I’d come up with a plan to fix the cracks, but first I needed to finish preparing the rest.
( continued in part 2)