The Pool Gravel Project

The Pool Gravel Project -

I was running the weed whacker a few weeks back, and I noticed the tall grass coming up around the edge of our pool.

I may not have mentioned it before, but our new house came with a 24' pool.  Some day, we hope to actually get into this pool and swim... until then, we will continue to spend endless hours and dollars on making it pretty and clean.

I didn't really think that running a weed whacker against the side of the pool was a good idea.  We brainstormed a while, and by brainstorm, I mean we googled : "what do I do about tall grass around my above ground pool?"  Most people just said they spray roundup, but one guy said he had put some stones around his pool, and he had a picture of it.  It looked pretty nice.  We totally stole his idea. Here's a picture of what he did:

You can read about the discussion at troublefreepool discussion .

The first step was to get rid of the grass around the pool.  I got some grass and weed killer that was non-petroleum based and pet safe so that I could use it around the pool.  We sprayed a 1' ring around the entire pool, and let it work for about a week.  We used Spectracide.

The next step was to put a weed barrier around the whole pool.  This stuff comes in rolls.  It's a landscaping fabric that blocks weeds and grass from growing up below it.  You attach it to the ground with steaks or big staples that you hammer into the ground.  Here's a link to the stuff we got from Home Depot.  landscaping fabric

We put this down in a circle all around the pool.  Then on the outside edge of the circle, we also put down some edging that would keep the stones in and keep them from falling out into the rest of the lawn.  Here's the part where my amazing math skills come in to play.  Our pool is a 24 foot pool.  I bought enough of the edging to go 40'.  That's PLENTY!  We started putting it around the pool.

When a pool claims to be a 24' pool.  That number refers to the DIAMETER.  The number that I was interested in was actually the circumference.  The formula for the circumference of a circle is c = 2Pi * r.  The circumference of our pool is 2 * 3.14 * 12 = 75' (my 40' of edging was NOT plenty)  Having now figured out the true scale of our project, I realized we were not going to have enough gravel either... or for that matter, enough money to buy enough gravel until next payday.  :(  We went ahead and put together what we had for now though.  It looked so good!

We spent a few weeks with our pool being 1/3 surrounded with white gravel chips while we waited for our bank account to rebound from the $500 Home Depot spending spree we went on when we started this project.  (we also got a ceiling fan for the bedroom that I'll blog about next)  I don't actually recall how we squandered the rest of that money.

Today we spent another $100 on the rest of the materials for this project.  In total, it took 22 Bags of the white gravel chips.  Each bag will cover approximately 3 feet square in 2" of gravel according to the bag.  That ends up being fairly accurate.  Here are a couple of pictures of the finished job. We are really happy with how it turned out!

Live well... Live Norman.
P