No more pool

Finally caught up with the pool on the blog - this is me yesterday chopping up the pool with my other big chopper (angle grinder). Sadly the photos don't quite do justice to the stream of sparks shooting out from between my legs, but Kerry tells me it was quite alarming... It turned out this was the easiest bit of the whole job, as the sheet metal chops us fairly easily.

The whole pool is held rigid at the top with a rim which just unscrews and lifts off. The posts at either side are connected underneath the pool by big steel ribbons to stop the base of the pool from splashing out at the bottom - another job for the angle grinder.

Finally we got everything in the car and away to the dump - and now we almost have a whole new garden! Just the concrete wall to go...

No powertools required

And here's the explanation for the bouncy decking.. the posts holding the decking up all go into blobs of concrete with big spiky rods in them. But they're rottten at the base.

I managed to break almost all of these posts just by pulling the away from the base with one arm.

This was how it looked last weekend - most of the decking gone and the garden starting to take shape...

Getting my chopper out at the pool

Ahhh.. if I can't hack my career in demolition, at last a good career at The Sun awaits...

We've spent a couple of weekends now unscrewing the decking around the old swimming pool. Despite being quite bouncy, some of the wood on top is still in reasonable condition, so the plan is to save it and build some raised beds with it. Every plank is screwed every couple of feet into the frame, so it's taken a while but we now have a reasonable collection of wood.

I couldn't handle the thought of more unscrewing, so eventually I cracked and bought yet another Tool, a Bosch PKS 60 A circular saw which made the job of "unscrewing" the decking rather easier. I say I cracked, but clearly this was just a good excuse... the fiddly bit was getting the hundreds of screw-laden spiky bit of wood to the dump.