Pool Prep...

We have been lucky enough to get a pool like this from a friend.She had only used it once and decided it was not safe enough in her garden as the only place she could put it was on a patio right near her new garden lodge worth £8.000.She was not keen on the idea of an accident happening and the edge of the pool being fallen on and the gallons of water flooding her garden lodge...

We bought it at a very good price and Alan set about leveling off this area of the garden.



It is near the house for the cable from the filter and is sunny most of the day(if we ever get anymore this year!)He pulled up the membrane and spent a long afternoon putting barrow loads of soil on to level it. He pulled back the membrane and then the next couple of days rained so we didn't get the pool set up.We then had a horrible thought!Our neighbours garden is to the left of this picture,it is on a slope and leads to their back door!! Remembering why H had sold us the pool we decided this was not a great spot after all...

Moving up the garden we decided this area at the top would be better.We had started to clear it a while ago to extend the patio area.The plan had been to make a wooden deck area,Al was going to use pallets but the work involved in stripping them down,getting equal lengths and prepping the wood has proved to be too much of a job for him to do on the little time he gets off.So we had left it till we could afford to buy materials.It is perfect for the pool.He will need to dig down to level the ground (our whole back garden is on a gentle slope)but as it is soft from the planting this shouldn't be too big a job.The main problem is the distance from the house and thus how far the cable for the filter has to run.We have a nephew who is an electrician who might be able to assist:-)



We will loose some of the patio that we have up here to fit in the pool.As it is a lovely sunny spot we will move over to the side of the pool and take down some trellis(that is actually so old it is only held up by the ivy)and behind the trellis

through this little opening



is this!!!



When we first moved here,11 years ago we had a share of a field as our back garden.The people either side and the owners of our house had bought the land at the back of the house and sectioned it off,when we bought it it was literally a rough grassed area.As we started the landscaping Alan decided to use this top corner as a dump for the sods of earth,good plan as it would then rot down and become good loam.However then we started to find lots of stones and other bits and pieces then got put up there "for the time being".Well 10 years on and it added up to around 7 tons of rubble (we do have quite a large garden) and he spent a full day a couple of weeks ago barrowing it down to a trailer he had hired off a farmer who had somewhere he could dump it.So it is nearly clear apart from some logs(from a tree we had felled last year) that a friend is going to buy off us and a load of wood that we could chop down and use on the chimenea.It was going to be a "secret" garden and we were going to put the chimenea up here and hang lanterns on the wall and lots of plants in pots.

Instead we are going to use the space to create a larger patio area for those sunny afternoon teas:-)