Work then play

We are fortunate to have a money pit... I mean pool in our backyard. It's nearly twenty years old and is always full of surprises for us. The latest surprise was a broken pump. As is the case with most of our projects, we jump in figuring we can do it ourselves to save money. Then about halfway through it when it's not going well we start to wonder why we didn't just hire someone. But by that point we're too embarrassed to call someone and fess up that we couldn't finish the job. So after two weeks, tons of work, and even more trips to the pool store and home depot we finally switched out the old pump for a shiny new one.

I know it doesn't look like much and I'll spare you all the details, but somehow putting in a new pump was pretty hard. Next time something like this happens we won't learn from our mistakes and hire someone because now we'll know what we're doing - right? As you can see from the picture all the other equipment looks quite old so it should be any day now...
After all the work was done and the new pump had time to help clean up the green water that had developed (it was starting to smell like a lake in our backyard) we spent some time on Saturday enjoying the pool again. Here are a few pictures from the fun moments that make all the work worthwhile.