We made it! The pool is up and lovely and it was soooooooooooooooo well worth the work. I noticed on Sunday that I hadn’t taken any photos of the entire process – and let me tell you, it was one hell of a process, but we did it fairly green (using reclaimed materials and manual labor) and we didn’t spend a dime on the process, other than to buy the pool and the pool goodies.
We have a huge back yard. None of it is even close to level, however. You’d think at least one small area would be, but nope. So we had to make a level place for the pool and decided on the location and then figured out how much work we’d have to do. Oh my goodness, lots of work. We used reclaimed timbers from our garden beds and even reused the rebar and nails to build a frame. When the frame was built, we saw that we needed to raise the level of the land within 3/4 of the frame up about 7 inches. That’s a huge amount of earth to move, tamp down, and level, but we had no choice. Using shovels and a pick ax, we dug up the western most garden – don’t be sad, we haven’t planted anything in those gardens for years. We loaded dirt into old medical crates 4 at a time and hauled the crates behind our tractor up to the site where we dumped the earth and started tamping down. We did this for 2 solid days until we had moved more than 1 full ton of earth from the bottom of our land to the top. After that was about 2 hours or so of detailed leveling, measuring, more leveling, eyeballing, etc. And then we set up the pool. It took about 4.5 hours to fill. Hell of a lot of work for a 12′ above ground pool, but it’s soooooooooooooo worth it. It’s blissful out there. Not deep, not huge, just perfect for our family.