So We Fibreglassed the 80s Swimming Pool

When we moved into our house, there were some things we immediately knew we needed to get done (update the alarm, put on burglar bars, paint the interior) and knew that there were a few things that we’d get done fairly soon (install a heat pump, fix up the kitchen, rip up the carpets and sand the parquet), but we also knew there were a few things that were a little more distant in the future…

One of those things was fixing up our pool. It is not quite kidney-shape, but it has an awkward overly-large shape very typical of the 1980s, and it clearly hadn’t seen the right side of a painter or builder for some time. It was something we were kind of ‘putting off’, I guess because we were too busy dreaming about home renovation, and also because it can get a bit pricy.

BUT we finally bit the bullet and decided to fibreglass our granite pool, the bottom of which was in SERIOUSLY bad shape – just check out the pictures below:

We did it properly – got a couple of quotes, asked for discounts and saw who threw in a few goodies to sweeten the deal. In the end, we settled on a team who also moved our pool pump away from the house and next to the pool (my garden! Looks like Peter Rabbit has been digging), who moved our borehole pump to the front of the house (yay!) and who installed a cool night light in the pool – looks like I have a psychedelic underwater disco in my back garden in the evenings.

Now I was also pretty conscious of the water situation – ESPECIALLY since we’re in the middle of water shortages and our Cape Town dams are sitting at about 16% desperately waiting for some much-needed rain. What would we do with the pool water? How do we drain it? Will we lose the water?! AH!

And nope. Sigh of relief! We paid a bit extra but our team hired these two HUGE rubber/canvas – for want of a better word – bladders? That hung out in our garden for two weeks holding all our pool water. We lost NO water except for a little bit to evaporation. I was so pleased with this!

The process itself is quite interesting. The team first dries out the pool surface, cleans it then starts to apply waterproofing and the super bright blue paint with rollers. Two coats of this with drying time between follows.

Then the huge rolls of sticky fibreglass gets stuck to the pool with special adhesives, it looks kind of like honeycomb being torn off and glued to the bottom of the pool. They then paint another couple of coats of various layers.

Then we were asked which mosaic do we want? Oh, my gosh I’m busying juggling kiddies and dinner and work and bath time and now I need to choose what mosaic we need to have around the rim of the pool. Turns out it’s not actually tiles, but a clever stick-on adhesive that takes next to no time and has a really lovely, long-lasting finish. Ours is called ‘Ocean Fizz’ – I kid you not.

 

And so, I returned from work one day and our pool was finished and filled with water again – a sparkling, turquoise, shiny swimming pool, totally worth the reno and the dug-up garden!

The question is, what’s next?

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