Swimming the Blues

by Turk Pipkin

The groundbreaking of my family’s long-awaited swimming pool promised to be a momentous occasion. The excavation crew unloaded a massive backhoe from a trailer, cranked up it’s thundering diesel engine and drove it across my lawn to the designated site.

“Before he starts digging,” my pool contractor declared, "you better sign the contract.”

Now I’m not insinuating that with the heavy equipment already in place, he thought I might just skim over the fine print, but that’s exactly what I did. Not that I’d taken complete leave of my senses; about to put pen to paper, I turned to my contractor (whose name shall remain as undisclosed as the fine print on his paperwork) and told him to give it to me straight.

“Where are the surprises going to come from?" I asked. "The extras? The add-ons? What’s going to drive up my cost?”

“No surprises,” he insisted, shocked that I'd even mention such a thing. “That’s the full price for a finished pool with a lifetime warranty on the shell."

Even though this well-rehearsed speech sounded as if he were speaking to a jury from a Grisham novel, I was reassured enough to go ahead and sign. With a wave of his hand, the backhoe operator set to work. What a thrill! Down went the bucket and down came a massive scoop of soil and grass that I would never have to mow again. In a matter of weeks, I'd be splashing with my family and swimming laps, super models would be dropping by for our famous pool parties, and... suddenly the backhoe's engine fell silent.

“Turn off the power!” I heard someone yell.

Looking closer I saw that on the very first scoop the backhoe had pulled up a thick gray electrical conduit which seemed to lead directly to my main breaker box. Running to the box, I pulled the cover open to find a spaghettied tangle of wires and broken breakers. The backhoe had pulled the power cable to my well-pump out of the electrical box and busted nearly every other breaker to my house as well.

I tried to remain calm.

After all, we live in a sixty-five year old house, so I'd known we might find some below-ground surprises. While waiting for an electrician, we decided to dig in another spot. But the other end of the pool layout proved to be no less troublesome. On the second scoop of the day, the backhoe pulled up the main water line to my house, a propane gas line—luckily I’d turned the tank off—a tangle of sprinkler control wires and several other large pipes. Water gushed from the broken pipes, but not for long, of course, because the power to the well was still off.

“You better get a plumber out here to go with that electrician,” I told my contractor.

“Okay,” he told me, “but remember, you’ll have to pay them.”

I was dumb-founded—what had he said ten minutes ago? What about “no surprises?”

“We’re not responsible for things hidden under the ground,” he retorted. “Check your contract.”

Dazed, I stumbled back into the house, took some aspirin and began to search for a magnifying glass with which to read the back side of the contract.

How had I come to this pass? I wondered. How could I have committed all my earthly resources to something as absolutely unessential as a swimming pool?

Well, for starters, both my wife and I are lap swimmers who rarely find time to drive someplace to swim. I’m also one of those dads who listens perhaps a little too carefully to his kids’ request. My oldest started clamoring for a pool when she was five, and I finally decided the only way to silence her was to fulfill her dream.

But that had been a year before. We’d designed a pool even taken bids, going so far as to cut down an oak tree that was in the way. But then we'd gotten cold feet, partially because we didn't have the money, but also because the pool didn’t really fit where we were trying to put it.

A year later, looking out my bedroom window one sunny morning, I realized we had a larger place to put a pool, though it was on a slope and might require excavation in solid rock.

No matter, with the money apparently burning a hole in my pocket, I called the original pool contractor who came out to take a look at the new site and my rough sketches. A week later, he was back with a bid for a lap pool forty-five feet long. With a limestone deck and retaining walls to keep the whole thing from sliding down the hill, the price was a staggering $35,000!

"That's bare bones," he assured me. "Hardly a nickel of profit."

It was also five grand higher than the price we couldn’t afford a year before. I began to look for another pool builder.

One of the best ways to find any kind of building contractor is to simply ask friends who they would use again for a similar job. So I asked five or six acquaintances who had built pools and every one of them said if I had a lot of time they’d be happy to tell me their pool-building horror stories.

Former Governor Ann Richards told me how her family had once bought a house in Suburban Austin that already had a huge pool.

"Unfortunately that sucker just leaked like a sieve!" she said. "I wanted to fill it in and plant corn but my hubby won out so we actually had to pay to build a second pool inside the old one!"

Though she made the horror of the experience sound scarier than "Halloween - H2O!," I was not dissuaded. Looking in the yellow pages, I called a couple of contractors who took the same specs I’d given the first guy. A week later, contractor number two faxed me a slick architectural drawing with an additional split-level deck and three waterfalls. I called him back to say it looked great and was just taking a sip of my morning coffee when he told me his price estimate was sixty grand. After doing a spectacular Danny Thomas spit-take, spewing coffee all over my computer screen, I told him I’d let him know. So far I haven’t gotten back in touch; perhaps he’ll read this article.

All my hopes fell on contractor number three who, in a coincidental stroke of luck, was already set to build a pool at a house under construction next door. Claiming he could save some money by bouncing his equipment and crews back and forth, the estimate came in at $29,000.

Sold on the price, I called the first contractor back—the one who wasn’t making a nickel for six grand more—and apologized for abandoning him after he’d worked so hard for my business.

“I’ll match his offer!” he told me in a flash.

At first I thought he was being incredibly generous. But then I realized he’d either included an extra six thousand in deniable profit in the first "bares-bones" bid, or he was going to lose a lot of money by building my pool. Either way, I wanted no part of it. Contractor three got my business.

Now, like any sucker about to blow the gross national product of Sierra Leone, before getting to this point I’d done a good deal of research on the general topic of pool building.

The cheapest pools are the vinyl-lined above-ground jobs, followed by vinyl-lined in-ground pools. Far more long-lasting and the type preferred by a vast majority of Texas pool owners are excavated pools with a shell made of gunnite concrete which is sprayed around a frame of steel rebar. While still wet, the gunnite is molded by hand to fit around the plumbing connections and lights. After this shell dries and cures, a layer of tile is added at the water line, then the rest is plastered to a smooth finish.

The contractor does almost none of this work himself. Most pools in a particular area are built by the same rotating crews of sub-contractors who descend upon your house, do their jobs, complain that they build pools but never get to swim in them, and leave a lot of empty soda cans and dangerous trash in their wake.

Because of the current building boom in many Texas cities, there is actually more demand for their services than there are crews, which is one reason why we decided to build our pool in the slack Fall season, rather than during the peak demand of Spring and Summer.

As to how long the job will take, the National Institute of Pool Builders recommends that pool contracts include a starting and 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 confessed. “It’s so hard to get crews that I can't make any promises."

No matter, I told myself, summer’s almost over and we won't get to swim much anyway before Spring. But deep down inside, I was thinking that when he said more than six weeks, he really meant seven or maybe eight weeks at the most. That meant we’d be swimming by Halloween.

Logic like this is what makes building a pool as self-delusional an act as believing that those little pubic hair plugs will make a bald guy's head look good.

Even after the ground-breaking damage to pipes and wires were put right, nothing progressed with any speed. The excavation quickly turned up ledge after ledge of hard limestone on which the backhoe’s huge jack-hammer pounded with a deafening rat-tat-tat for days, the impact shaking our entire house and nearly driving me mad.

Nearly deaf by the time the hole was complete, I hardly heard when my contractor informed me that he was going elk hunting.

“I’ll be back in a couple of weeks,” he promised.

Not too surprisingly, the work ground to a halt. Then a few days after the end of the elk hunt, just as workers were again beginning to show, my contractor’s pager message was suddenly changed to say, “Hi! This is your pool guy, and if you know me, you know where I am on the first day of deer season.”

Deer season—ten weeks long! A pang of regret stabbed at my heart as I considered the matching offer that I’d refused from my first bidder, a gentle fellow who didn't seem as if he'd hurt a fly.

By the time this project was over, I was going to need hair plugs myself.

Just how slowly the work would progress soon became crystal clear—certainly clearer than the muddy rainwater water that for months was breeding thousands of mosquitoes in my half-built pool.

To my contractor's credit, the work that was getting done was being done well. The plumbers installed water lines and skimmers in less than a day, and a fine crew of stone masons arrived to install the limestone coping around the pool's edge. As the work progressed, we begin to see a few holes in our design which the contractor put right without complaint.

After the gunnite was finished, my wife and I were worried that the steps into the pool were too steep, so the stone crew raised them slightly and added a wide fourth step as a play area for younger kids. As the vertical walls were built around the end dug into the hill, we realized for the first time that a swimmer in trouble in that end wouldn’t have any sides to hold on to. No problem, the stone guys simply added a couple of bench-style love seats in those two corners.

Since safety is one of the most important considerations in the design of any pool, when the decks were finished I began the laborious job of building fences and gates around the entire pool area. This, of course, was a huge expense I'd neglected to include in my overall budget.

By Halloween, we were optimistic of a finished pool at any day. Three weeks later at Thanksgiving we were still hopeful of a nice swim by early December.

With my hair thinning by the hour, the plumbing, tile and rockwork were finally declared complete. Three months after we'd begun, the pool was finally scheduled to be plastered. But after months of scarcely leaving the house, I had to be out of town that day.

Despite the contractor's earlier promise to powerwash the coping and decks, at the last minute he decided it was unnecessary 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, the hose had been turned on and the pool was slowly filling.

But long before the pool was filled Murphy's Law had its way in the form of a huge rainstorm which washed the dirt from the coping down the sides of the pool.

"No problem," the contractor said of 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 sand paper 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 they didn't look so bad after all.

I began to dream about hunting accidents, and the dreams were not unpleasant.

Despite the stains, the pool looked inviting that first week as we waited for the plaster to cure. Though it was mid-December, the weather was warm and the kids were clamoring for their first swim. And after all my carping about the hassles of construction, I had to finally admit that our new pool was one of the prettiest I'd ever seen. At night we’d turn on the pool lights and dream of late-evening summer pool parties. In the mornings, I’d get up early and think how nice it would be to 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’d 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 major cold front was on the way and the temperatures that night were predicted to drop into the twenties. This would be our last chance to swim, possibly for months. I checked the floating thermometer in the pool—fifty-seven degrees.

Eighty degrees is considered an optimum water temperature for swimming. Many people like itwarmer. Our pool was actually about ten degrees colder than the famously cold water at 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. I hit the water and in nanoseconds came up screaming for mercy.

And to think, some people said I’d regret building a pool.