Who's ready for a pool party??

You're ready to come on over and jump right in....right?  HA!  Isn't this amazingly disgusting??  Big thanks to Zach for offering to come over and help us out (free beer probably helped, but we are thankful either way).  I joked that I was going to charge a membership fee to use the pool (to help pay for all the maintenance), but Jamie and Zach can swim for free this year :O)

When we were looking at buying this house Ryan and I agreed that the pool would come down.  Although everyone thinks they are a ton of fun, I know that they can be a TON of work.  And, this particular pool looked like this last year when we moved in.  After a lot of convincing Ryan got me to agree that we would keep it.  So, we are in the process of taking this gross pool and making it into a place that someone would actually want to jump into.

As you can see, we started by draining about a third of the water out and the boys hopped in with waders to try and scoop out some of the muck.  When we bought the house, the pool didn't have a filter/pump hooked up.  The owners said they'd used it all the way up until the summer before and then the pump broke so they basically stopped caring about it.  Well, the fact that there were being foreclosed on didn't help either.  So, when we moved in, we knew it was nasty like this.  They did have an old cover on it, but it had all disintegrated (as you can see from the little blue bubbles everywhere).  So, we threw a tarp over it and called it "closed for winter" and figured we'd tackle it in the spring. 

Last weekend we decided it was finally time to pull the cover off and see what we had.  Sadly, winter didn't magically make this pool clean and clear.  So, the boys started scooping.  It's not quite swimming weather around here yet, but we've got to fill this back up with hose water, the add all the chemicals and see where we are at.  Since the water will be freezing cold we wanted to start early so that when it is finally warm enough to swim, we've got a pool we can actually use, instead of starting here in a month from now. 

So, that's how we spent part of Mother's Day....what did you do?  Can't wait to have you all over for a pool party!