A longtime dream of mine came true this summer. Our backyard now boasts a pool!
It was a real saga, getting from the point of first moving into this house (June 2020) to where we are today. My advice for anyone who wants a pool is this: move to a house that already has one.
If it wasn't already difficult enough shopping for a pool in post-Covid days, we had another complicating factor: a septic system that, according to the diagram on the permit, took up the entire back yard. One tank at the other end of the yard and four leach lines going all the way across. We also had a big old tree on the side of the yard close to where the pool now sits. The regulation is that the water must be 15 feet from any part of the septic system. Tim and I made many phone calls and discussed the possibility of septic reduction or moving the septic to the front yard. Those would both be very costly and disruptive endeavors that would leave our yard torn up for months, front and back.
We also talked about moving. We looked at land for sale nearby, look at building plans, and tried to visualize. I struggled at the thought of moving, when I was so comfortable and happy in this house, and we'd just had a bunch of landscaping and renovations done. It might have all served to make the house more sellable, but it also made me feel very invested and attached! I thought to myself many times that I really wished I'd made the pool, or the possibility of one, more of a priority in the house search. It felt like too petty of a thing to be assertive about, but I know in hindsight there was nothing petty about this at all.
We talked to neighbors and stalked their properties in the county records. We compared notes with the guy across the street who told us he had a "dossier" of his own. In this neighborhood you fall into one of three categories:
1) you have a pool or one underway, and are very fortunate (maybe you had a hand in the building of the house and deciding where the septic goes, or just were able to work around it in the case of another neighbor I spoke to);
2) you don't have one and you don't care; or
3) you want one, but have a septic system in the way (us and the guy across the street, for example).
We talked about a pool and gave up on it multiple times because of the obstacles we had. But just in case, we started chipping away at the obstacles. The big old tree, along with the jungle gym, disappeared, I think, the following spring after we moved in.
When we were visiting family in Massachusetts last July, as we were all frolicking in Tim's sister Kathy's pool, one of us said, "Maybe one day we'll have our own pool." I think it was Tim. Kathy said, "Can I just give you some advice? Don't wait for 'one day.' If you're gonna do it, do it now." Or something to that effect. And I couldn't even look Tim in the eye at that moment, but I'm sure the same thought passed through both our minds at the same time: Well, crap.
But you already know the end of the story. What set it in motion was really, no exaggeration here, a stroke of genius on Tim's part. The solution, along with a lot of human waste,* was already in the ground back there, but you had to know to look.
That is what occurred to Tim last July. So he asked me to make a call, and we had a guy come out from A1 Sewer and Drain to mark the septic system for us, so we would know exactly what was where. While he was there, I asked him about septic reductions, and he was Mr. Negativity. He told me that many of my neighbors have septic problems, and a system that works well is not something you want to mess with. "How many people do you have living in this house?" he asked at one point. When I told him six, he said, "Whoa, I did NOT see that coming." I guess that sounded like a lot of toilets flushing to him. He wouldn't be wrong, haha. Of course, in the end he said as long as we had a permit and money, he would do whatever we asked. I gave him the diagram from the septic permit, and I watched him walk around the yard finding all the parts. Tank, check. first leach line, check. Second, check. Third, check. Then he searched for the fourth line, the one in question, the one we were talking about reducing, and he couldn't find it. He put the probe in the ground in numerous places, and at last had to conclude that a fourth leach line did not exist. That cost us $350.
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| Aside from the star of this photo, you can see we have a zero gravity chair to the right. We had those for a minute, they seemed like a good idea, but we learned the hard way to never put a zero gravity chair on concrete. It bleeds rust when it gets wet. Not to mention, they were not aesthetically pleasing out there. For my next choice of loungers, I opted for something with no metal parts at all. |
This changed everything. No fourth line meant all this extra space in the yard. We went out to the backyard and measured the distance between the third line and the house, and suddenly we found we had room for a pool. It felt miraculous to me.
My next call was to the Health Department the following day. I had already applied for a septic repair permit in order to have the reduction done, and now I wanted to rescind that. When I explained why, the man I was talking to looked up our property and said, "No, you've got four leach lines..." He put me on speaker so that his co-worker, who happens to live in our cul-de-sac, could be part of the conversation. I don't remember most of what he said about our neighborhood, septic, blah blah. He joked that Jason wasn't trying to sabotage us from getting a pool. (Know, reader, that having any connection in the health department did not give us an advantage, as our neighbor across the street already had found out for himself. We all had to go through proper channels.) To conclude, he said, "Ok, tell you what -- we're going to be at Jason's tomorrow at 11 for his inspection.** We'll go to your house afterward and take a look."
At the appointed time he arrived with an assistant, and they both set about doing the same thing the guy from A1 Sewer had already done, throwing the probe into the ground and finding the leach lines one by one. I waited with bated breath as they tried to find the fourth in the area indicated by the diagram. And then! And then, what do you know, they walked all the way to the back of the yard, to the property line just about, threw the probe in the ground and found the fourth line. We now knew that we do indeed have four leach lines, and we still had all the space we had measured out for a pool. Nothing needed to be moved, nothing needed to be modified. This cost us $0.
By the end of that month, we had sat down with a pool builder, signed a contract, and finally had a pool in the works. I was like a deer in headlights when it came to choosing the shape and color, and whatever else. It didn't feel real, and if you think I had been preparing ahead and looking at my options, you don't know me well. I just wanted a pool! I looked at the catalog of fiberglass pools she gave us, and I narrowed my choices down to the ones that fit in the space we had, looked at the renderings she sent us, and finally just circled one. It's nothing fancy, just a pool with concrete around it. We were restricted to 14x30, which is small as far as pools go, but it suits us well. It's kind of meant for lazing around--it has a decent amount of seating in it--but contains enough swim space for the kids to play in.
In February we had our official Health Department inspection, and that was followed soon after by the installation of the pool. It felt super climactic watching it arrive on a flatbed truck, and seeing it lowered by crane by the light of the moon. But then it just sat there for months like that with the company doing a few hours of work maybe once every few weeks or months. That was maddening. The scheduled completion date in May came and went. At one point Tim received a text telling him that the whole thing was going to be wrapped up in the next 10 days, early May! And then no one showed up, I kid you not. I had a *little something* to distract me that month, so I wasn't as upset as I might have been, but I did notice and I was pretty annoyed.
At last, at the end of June, some guys showed up, put in about a week's straight worth of work, and got it all finished. We swam for the first time on July 1. Thomas was six weeks old. I spent most of those first couple weeks watching jealously from my bedroom window as the rest of the family swam. What I couldn't do much of while tending to a newborn was jump in the pool.
At the same time, as I watched them out the window, I could be glad that they had something to occupy them that was out in the fresh air and sunshine during the long hot days. It was truly a godsend to have it in time for this summer. We weren't going many places at all while we were in town because I was always feeding a baby or trying to get him to take a nap, but we had this right outside our back door.
The novelty has mostly worn off for the kids as I knew it would, but I continue to steal out there every chance I get, to lounge by the pool and take a dip. I've got my music on and it feels like a mini-vacation. The pool was really more for me than for them, to be honest, but I am happy to see them enjoying it too. After school, Joey and a friend often want to swim when the weather cooperates, and I love hearing their excited chatter while they play. I'm so glad that this is now part of their childhood experience. I currently have the heater on, and I'll see how long I can make the season last.
Most outdoor things fall in Tim's domain to take care of, but the pool is the exception. He has no time for it; he's got way too much on his plate already. I think of it as my sixth baby, and while I do need help sometimes, I take care of it myself. I took video of my pool school, and pointed the phone at everything the pool guy (whose name also happens to be Tim) showed me. I watched the videos many times, and the first three times I went through my weekly cleaning routine, I went step-by-step with them. I called him a few times with my dumb questions, which he was happy to answer. I really thought I had the hang of the week-to-week pool care, but one day after I'd gotten done vacuuming, and had emptied the pump basket, I turned the system back on and for whatever reason it just wouldn't work. I called my husband over, and he had me walk him through what I'd done (nothing out of the usual, I thought), he started pressing some buttons, and it kicked on. I have no idea what I did to break it, and he has no idea what he did to fix it.🤷Is this every new pool owner or just us?
Tim still gets the itch to move -- he's crazy like that. One time he said to me, "We could move to a house with a yard that could have a pool right in the middle, right out the back door." But to that I said, "I kind of like that the pool isn't the main attraction, that it's just tucked into one corner." If we only want to be in bathing suits a few months out of the year, I like that we still have the whole rest of the yard for throwing a ball around, playing cornhole, flashlight tag, and whatever else they like to do. Above is a photo taken from the opposite corner, and from that perspective you see a nice big backyard that happens to have a pool. Our next door neighbor finally trimmed that hedge too, which makes the view so much better. You can't really see from this angle, but that hedge was really out of control and kind of an eyesore that I just tried not to see. (Tim is rolling his eyes at that--he couldn't have cared less about that hedge.)
The pool was the last piece of the puzzle that makes our house the place we need never leave. Having it transforms the dog days of summer into the best days, and I couldn't be more grateful.
**To get a pool permit. Jason and his family were in Category 1 because they built their house and made sure their septic was in the front.
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