Sunday, June 19, 2011

Pool Deck


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Big weekend of projects around here. One of the most significant accomplishments of the past week was that I finally got the filter and salt treatment system working on my tiny backyard pool. Thank you Ed and Jay for making this happen!! My pool is 12' in diameter and came from Wal-Mart about two years back. It has never gotten much use though, because of (a) the no-filter-no-salt problem and (b) the no-easy-way-to-get-dogs-in-and-out problem. So, with the filter now in place and working perfectly, I decided to tackle the second problem immediately and build a "pool deck" for my dogs. Found old plastic shelving in my shed and bought additional (new) shelving at Lowe's. Used my hacksaw to adjust leg heights as needed. Bought a few rubber door mats and secured them to shelving with zip ties. More zip ties were used to attach shelving to the pool frame and a few cinder block pieces were used to provide weight on the bottom shelf. You can see the results here, but I can report that the new deck worked exactly as hoped and all dogs seemed able to get up and into the pool and then (more importantly) out again. Only two of my dogs (Flake and Pilot) are showing much enthusiasm for the water at this point, but I am hopeful that the others will come around. Canine swimming lessons and water aerobics start this week. :-)

Oops.

Oh dear. Slacking off again in the blogging department. Where has the year gone?? Has it really been months (??) since I last updated this blog? Will once again renew my commitment to posting here with regularity and see if I can do better in the days ahead. Plenty going on and plenty more planned, so I shouldn't have trouble finding things to report.

Stay tuned.