It’s the middle of April, the trees are in bloom and the grass is growing again. Spring at Villa Mantua is on the rise. This summer I hope to get a few, long overdue projects done. Last year the pool developed a leak and that means it time for a new liner. I never really cared for one that we put in in ’98. It looked fine in the small sample but not as convincing in the ground. But given the 15 year lifespan that a vinyl liner has, it hardly seemed worth changing it before now. This time we gave it a lot more thought. We poured over the sample pictures and had pretty much settled on one until we went down to the pool store. Once there we took the full samples outside and tried to imagine them. But they didn’t seem to live up to the expectations. In the end we kept coming back to one of their display pools and after a lot of consideration decided that we really liked one that they had installed with a rock waterfall.
Interestingly it was one of the patterns that we had decided we definitely did not want-which goes to show that when shopping for a pool liner, you really have to see it in the ground and filled with water. Now we wait for the 3rd of May-our installation date, to see if our choice is the correct one.
Once the new liner is in it’s onto the rest of the backyard projects. Through the years I have had to rework the main deck off the house. When we moved in, it had rotted in places and the boards have splintered. I’ve replaced them as needed but it really needs a complete make-over. The original construction used 1×6 planks on the raised deck and 2×6 planks on the ground level deck. The 2×6 deck feels a lot sturdier and less prone to warping so when I expanded the side of the deck I used 2×6’s. We have talked about redoing the top deck and adding a kitchen/bar arrangement and this may be the year for that. This plus enclosing the hot tub and adding the pergola/water feature to the other side of the pool will complete our renovations to the deck areas. Oh, and then there’s the pool pump enclosure. And a new gazebo, and redoing the landscaping. It never ends…