8- Painting the Pool

I think it was the following weekend after Memorial Day that we took on a monumental task- repainting the pool. Its quite an undertaking, between draining the pool for days, drying it out, whitewashing...and then giving it my final custom touches :)

Down there you can see the old "S" that I painted years ago, I think in 2004 (but don't quote me on that). It was nice but too small, too reserved, not dramatic and bold enough.

The first task was re-whitewashing the pool. We used some old-old paint that took a drill attachment emergency-purchased at Lowe's (because the paint is two part epoxy and has a limited number of hours after you start mixing it before it starts setting up, permanently). We got the paint mixed fine and it went on well, though we used it all up and so some areas didn't get repainted if they didn't need it. The paint was going on thick, despite the reflecting heat from the sun in the pool, which felt like a giant solar collector.

I was hanging onto the side of the pool for hours on end, scooting around and edging it with a brush. Got my calves stretched out real good ;)

I was lucky that my dad offered to help. Since the paint was slowly setting up and it was taking me a long time to do all the edging...

After we'd just about melted in the gleaming white sun, it cooled down in the afternoon and the cousin kids came over and horsed around like it was a skate park. Glad they're not old enough to skateboard.

I used some sidewalk chalk to chalk out the outline of the new S...I wanted it to snake up the slope into the shallow end, to engage the whole pool rather than just be a design on the bottom of the deep end, and I thought the swirl in the shallow end would be entertaining for kids.

It was my mom's turn to pitch in after the white paint had dried, and help me with the S- I painted the edges of it, which I was insanely fastidious about painting in perfectly smooth curves (hard since the bottom of the pool wasn't necessarily smooth) and then she filled in the S. That paint was thick too though which made it tough, and epoxy paint can't exactly just be watered down.

Looking good, pretty cool to paint something on a large scale like this.

The S is done!

I also chalked out a big swirl in the shallow end, but I was running out of paint, and it was starting to drizzle a bit. So I ended it in a streaky tail (right above my mom's head) and then we started edging the steps with the remaining paint...

Here's what I WAS gonna paint. Yeah it would have been cool, but it would taken a lot longer to do. And like I said...paint...drizzle...oh and it was slowly getting dark.

Score!! We finished! Oh wait...what's that in the deep end? Is that... ah yes, a pool of water. It started raining. We tried tarping the S, which just started sticking to the slowly-curing paint, then we tried tarping the steps, and meanwhile the shallow end was filling with water. But it didn't seem to be doing anything to the paint?

Unfortunately, it DID something to the paint. See how the tail is all streaky and faded? Thats what the water did. After I headed back to Chicago, and the rain stopped, my mom painted the S again for me (making it wider in a couple places that I added chalk to because it wasn't quite right). I decided to leave the end of it streaky cause I thought it would look cool. Blue fading to...faded. She did a good job of fixing it.


Looks pretty badass, full of water.

My hope was always that planes could see it from the air- someday I need to fly over our house and look :)

The one unfortunate part of the whole thing is that, over the course of the summer apparently the old white paint wasn't loving life, and started peeling off in sheets. The paint was probably 10 years old or something at this point, but it was two-part epoxy sitting in separate cans. We though it'd be fine. It wasn't. So I think next summer we're gonna hafta drain it again and fix the white paint somehow. Awesome. I'm really stoked. Really.