return of the pool guy

Regular readers will know about our swimming pool. In the 12 June posting I wrote about what a state it was in after being left uncared for over a year, whilst we were back in the UK. We had virtually emptied it and cleaned it before the torrential rains came and filled up the deep end again, rather depressingly. We also noticed that the lining had come away from the pool sides in several places and hadn’t returned with the weight of rain water on it. For over two weeks we’ve been trying to get in touch with Andrea , who installed the pool for the previous owners, and yesterday he turned up.

Advertisement

the pool

One of the things that really attracted us to this house was the lovely swimming pool and the first year we were here at least one of us would have used it every day the weather was good. And they mostly were. It was great when family and friends came to stay and it was just so good to jump into at the end of a hot day working in the garden. Although it isn’t heated we were still using the pool up until C went back to the UK to undertake a work opportunity at Harrods in late October. We had it covered in November (by our good looking pool guy Andrea – see posting 7 May 2007) and shortly after that I returned back to the UK with R for her knee operation. But virtually everyday since it had been originally cleaned by Andrea back in April, I’d enjoyed spending an hour or so each morning doing basic pool cleaning and maintenance, all that is apart from fishing out the usually drowned wildlife from the filters. The mice, lizards and beetles had stopped bothering me early on but the hedgehogs and bullfrogs were always pretty shocking to behold upon lifting that filter cover each morning. It was the sense of not knowing what you were going to find in there that was unsettling plus the thought that dead or not I still had to fish out a 2lb bullfrog from the filter and dispose of it.