Summer Vacation 
First Person
In Over My Head
So you want to build a backyard pool? You can count on two things: The job will take a lot longer than promised, and it won’t always go swimmingly.
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Now, like any sucker about to blow the gross national product of Sierra Leone, I had done a good deal of research on the general topic of pool building before getting to this point. I had learned that the cheapest pools are the vinyl-lined aboveground jobs, followed by vinyl-lined in-ground pools. Far more long-lasting are the type preferred by most Texas pool owners: excavated pools with a shell made of gunite, concrete that is sprayed around a frame of steel rebar. While still wet, the gunite is molded by hand around the plumbing connections and the lights. After this shell dries and cures, a layer of tile is added at the waterline, then the rest is plastered to a smooth finish. The contractor does almost none of this work himself. Most pools in a given area are built by the same rotating crews of subcontractors, who descend upon your house, do their job, complain that they build pools but never get to swim in them, and leave a lot of empty soda cans and dangerous construction debris in their wake.
Because there aren’t enough crews to meet the demand during the peak spring and summer pool-building season, we decided to build our pool in the late summer and fall. The National Spa and Pool Institute recommends that contracts include a starting date and a completion date. I ran that idea by my guy, and he told me that a year earlier he could have guaranteed a finished pool in six weeks. “But now,” he said, referring to Austin’s building boom, “it’s so hard to get crews that I can’t make any promises.”
Though his words were clear, my vision of a finished pool was clearer, and deep down inside, this naive homeowner was thinking that when he said it would take more than six weeks, he meant seven or maybe eight weeks at the most. We’d be swimming by Halloween!
Logic like this is what makes building a pool as self-delusional an act as a bald guy’s having hair implants and believing those little plugs will make his head look good. Even after the initial damage to pipes and wires was put right, nothing progressed with any speed. The excavation quickly turned up ledge after ledge of hard limestone that the backhoe’s giant jackhammer pounded for days with an earthshaking rat-tat-tat. Practically deaf by the time the hole was dug, I hardly heard my contractor inform me that he was going elk hunting. “I’ll be back in a couple of weeks,” he promised.
Now I’m not saying that work ground to a halt because he was hunting, but it was a few days after his return from the mountains that workers began to show up again. That was when my contractor’s pager message was changed to “Hi! … If you know me, you know where I am on the first day of deer season.” Deer season—how many days would he be away hunting? I felt a pang of regret as I thought of the matching offer I’d refused from my first bidder, a gentle fellow who probably wouldn’t hurt a fly, much less an animal. By the time this project was over, I was going to need hair plugs myself.
When progress did occur, it was in intense but brief spurts. The plumbers installed the water lines and skimmers in a single day. The gunite crew showed up soon after and completed the structural part of the pool and the retaining walls for the deck in ten hours. Then nothing. The ponderous silence of no one working soon had me longing for the noise of construction. After a couple of heavy rains, the muddy water in the half-built pool was breeding thousands of mosquitoes.
Eventually a crew of stonemasons arrived to put the limestone coping around the pool’s edge and build the limestone decks. As the work continued, we saw that our design was missing some essential elements—an extra step for the kids and, for any swimmer in trouble, bench-style love seats in the corners of the deep end. Though the contractor made these changes without complaint, they, of course, took even more time.
I was beginning to wonder if the pool would ever be finished. When Halloween came, we were optimistic that it would be ready within days. At Thanksgiving we were looking forward to a nice swim by the first of December. Three weeks later, with my hair thinning by the hour, the plumbing, tile work, and rock work were declared complete. Nearly four months after we’d begun, the pool was scheduled to be plastered and filled. But after weeks of scarcely leaving the house, I had to leave town on business.
Despite his earlier promise to powerwash the coping and decks, the contractor decided at the last minute that the cleaning wasn’t necessary, and the plaster crew went directly to work. This was not a good call. That evening, my wife phoned to tell me that the pool was creamy white and beautifully smooth. Since the plaster actually cures while the pool is filling with water and for a week or so after that, the hose had been turned on and the pool was slowly filling.
But then, long before the pool was full, Murphy’s Law kicked in: A heavy rainstorm washed dirt from the coping and debris from the oak trees down the sides of the pool. “No problem,” the contractor said when confronted with the ugly stains on the wet plaster. “We’ll brush them out.” When that didn’t work, he said, “No problem. We’ll use wet-dry sandpaper to get them out.” When that didn’t work, he said, “No problem. We’ll use a sanding block.” When that didn’t work, he said he thought the stains didn’t look so bad after all. I began to dream about hunting accidents, and the dreams were not unpleasant. (In March, he would finally drain the pool halfway and wash away the stains with muriatic acid.)
Though it was now mid-December, the weather was warm and the kids were eager for a dip. And after all my carping, I had to admit that our new pool was one of the prettiest I’d ever seen. I thought of how nice it would be to get up early and swim my morning laps at dawn, then climb out to a hot cup of coffee.
Finally, on December 21, the pool was declared swimmable. We had started in the summer, and now, on the first day of winter, we were finally pulling on our suits and preparing to jump in. A cold front was on the way and the temperature was predicted to drop into the twenties that night. This would be our last chance to swim, possibly for months. I checked the floating thermometer in the pool: 57 degrees. Although 80 degrees is considered the optimum water temperature for swimming, our pool was about 10 degrees colder than the famously frigid water of Austin’s Barton Springs.
I tried to wade in slowly but couldn’t bear it. Still, I’d spent every cent to my name on this pool, and I would not be denied. Backing up on the deck, I took a running start and made a huge leap. In mid-air, for some reason my mind was filled with the image of a Vienna sausage and two raisins. Within nanoseconds of hitting the water, I came up screaming for mercy.
And to think some people said I’d regret building a pool.
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