Scars

The yellow dinosaurs have retreated, leaving deep scars in what once was our garden.
Following the path of destruction the garden in its places mostly resembles a plowed field.

Dinosaur footprints

The company doing the excavation claims to have some heavy equipment with which they can churn up the soil breaking up all lumps of mud. But it but that will have to wait until later when the soil dries up.

Potato field or garden?

The pool itself is pretty much finished. Some cleaning up to be done to get rid of the sand.
Without the deck in place it looks like a mini beach resort. Believe the kids would have been completely satisfied with having sand next to the water. Our daughter (4 yrs) already planned to take a dip. It really didn't help that we tried to explain that the water is freezing cold.

Beach resort

Next up is the pump/machine room. The plan was to stuff the circulation pump and sand filter in between the sauna and the garage. Not a lot of space but should be sufficient for the purpose. The location is sheltered from weather as well as allowing us to build doors on both ends providing noise reduction. Even though the pump is most likely rather silent it will produce noise which I intend to reduce as much as possible.

First thing is to build a simple floor on to which we can attach the pump. It needs to be attached to something as otherwise the rotational movement of the pump will cause it to move around. The filter on the other hand will be filled with 70+ Kg of sand and will not budge.

snakepit

Having built the floor of the machine-room-to-be we sat and pondered for a while how to most efficiently connect the pipes. Stiff 50mm PVC pipes and bends are not that fun to work with.

Some Googling later we found out that there are reinforced PVC tubes allowing for some flexibility.

So we gave up on the machine room and will order new parts. It's just not worth the aggravation to use stiff pipes.

Spending the rest of the weekend to ponder on the layout of upcoming deck and preparing the ground to be reasonably level.

Title reference: Scars/Catacombs of the black Vatican/Black Label Society