A Pool Anniversary – First Quarter Century

July 2025 marks the 25^th anniversary of us having a pool in our backyard.

A lot has changed over the years both with our pool, the landscaping surrounding it, and even who swims in it as in addition to the two of us  and our children, we now have grandchildren also enjoying the pool.

Over the twenty-five years, there have been a number of maintenance actions that we have had to take to continue our pool enjoyment.  We have had to repair holes in the liner twice.  We replaced the liner in our pool three times, most recently just last year.  And last year, we also replaced the pool pump for the second time.  But one item has stood the test of time, at least until now.

When we originally put in our pool in the year 2000, I asked the pool company to install the pool equipment (Pump, Filter Housing, Polaris pump) on the left side of the house so it would be out of sight.  Unfortunately, we were not there when it was installed.  When we returned home, we discovered that instead it had been placed on the backside of the house (We were later told there was not enough room on the side of the house to place it where we had requested).

I knew we were not going to enjoy sitting by the pool seeing the guts of the pool exposed not to mention hearing the loud whine of the pump.  So, I took matters into my own hands.  I built a fence around the equipment.

This definitely concealed the unsightly equipment and helped to deaden the sound emanating from the pump.

Over the years, the cedar planks weathered fairly well and in 2007, when we were building our deck, the fence still looked good.

Even fifteen years later in 2022, when the focus of my photo was my brother enjoying his adult beverage, the pool fence in the background still looked fairly well.

But less than three years later, the fence desperately needed to be replaced.

When I originally designed the fence, I constructed it so that the entire front panel could be removed allowing for easy access to the pool equipment.   I also added a removable blue foam insulation panel on top to absorb pump noise.  During the summer months, this insulation panel also served a secondary purpose by providing a place to store pool floaties.

The only real flaw in this design is that this single front panel, a removable gate so to speak, is quite heavy for one person (i.e., me)  to lift up and man handle out of the way.

And predominately the times when I needed to remove it was when we had significant rain fall.  This was to allow me to access the grey two-way valve on the front of the filter housing.  This valve bypasses the filter housing and diverts water to waste through that white pipe on the left so as to remove the excess water from the pool.

With this front panel waterlogged from the rain, it becomes even heavier to lift up and out of the way and since I am 25 years older now, it has become even more of a challenge.

I knew I would need to come up with a new design for the front section and in particular, one that eliminated the need for lifting a heavy panel.  In discussions with my wife about the problem, she suggested I build a gate that opened outward.  A logical solution indeed but the only problem is the level of the sidewalk is significantly higher than the ground in front of the fence and I would have had to leave an enormous gap at the bottom of the gate to allow clearance over the elevated sidewalk.

After some pondering, I came up with a fairly simple idea—making the lift out section smaller.  By increasing the fixed portion of the fence front from one cedar picket on each side to three on each side would reduce the number of pickets attached to the lift out panel from twelve to eight.  And I could further reduce its weight by building the support frame for these eight pickets also from cedar rather than heavier pressure-treated wood.

With a plan in mind, the first step was to remove the old cedar pickets from the support frame.  This turned out to be harder than I thought.  When I built the fence 25 years ago, I must have used whatever size nails I had around.  Being too long, I hammered down the sharp edges.

Using either a screwdriver, a crowbar, a claw hammer or all three, I had to bend these nails back straight so I could then hammer the nails out enough to be able to grab the nail heads and pry them out of the wood.  With 32 cedar pickets, and four nails per picket, that was 128 nails I had to straighten and remove.  It took me five hours to accomplish this, and, in the end, I was dead tired.

With all the cedar pickets removed, I was pleased to see how well the pressure treated 4” X 4” posts and 2” X 4” studs had faired having been exposed to 25 years of outdoor weather.  In fact, they were in such good shape, that none of them would have to be replaced.  The only issue was the 2” X 4” attached to the house on the left side had come lose over the years.  This just needed to be reattached to the bricks.

I made a shopping list of all the items I thought I would need and headed off to my favorite big box hardware store in my wife’s Subaru Outback (I tried but 6’ long pickets would not fit in my Subaru WRX).  I found almost everything I needed (more on that later) and headed to the check-out counter.  I then loaded it all up in the back of my wife’s car for the drive home.

Now I was ready to build the new fence.

     To be continued…