Ok, so even though I am now back at square one, I thought I'd share my first build pics. Let's call it a practice build, a rehearsal for the real deal hahaha.
Here is my husband, rolling out the wall! The end is taped to the ladder to act as a third person. We were so filled with hope and excitement at this point!
Wall is up! I followed and clipped in the omega stabilizers, on top. They did help at this point.
Here is the mini prototype I made last week, to map out how I would fit 18 sheets of 4x8 polystyrene on the floor, without having to buy a 19th....they were expensive!! I think our total bill for the 18 sheets of 1inch was $350.
And here we are, triple taping our seams and fitting them all just right. It was a thing of beauty.
Poly is almost down, and it's getting LATE! How did that take so many hours!? It's about 10pm now, and the sun is setting FAST. It is cooling off, I went in to get a sweater. Not a lot of hope for our poor, chilly liner. At this point, we can either keep going and just cross our fingers that the liner, which has now sat out for 7 hours in the sun while we worked, will have retained enough heat to stretch out. Or, the alternative options are we stop now and leave the walls up with nothing to hold them and pray for no wind, or take it all down. We'd been working since 3pm (it was now 10pm) and we kind of thought we could still pull it off.
That liner made it 75% of the way around, and then just wouldn't budge. I climbed underneath it and pulled from every corner, which bought us a few inches, but not enough. To make matters worse, to install the j-bead liner, now you need to take OFF those omega stabilizers two at a time. So, you snap two off, but you need to slide them out from the joiner caps. At the second section, the entire rim just whipped off (the caps were on so tight, probably because the temp dropped so fast?!) This caused the pool to start caving in, so we were running around like mad trying to support it and get these rails back on. Eventually we just left them off and dealt with the bowing. The liner being so tight was NOT helping. Once we realized there was no way that liner was going up, it was 11:30pm. We thought we'd take the chance of leaving the wall up as-is, folded the liner into the middle, and went to bed, disheartened. In the wee hours of the morning, 4:30/5am, we woke up to the sound of wind (as mentioned in my previous post....). Looked outside, the walls were buckling everywhere, with obvious creases from our bedroom window. We ran as fast as we could, and tried just holding them up while thinking about how we could anchor them to buy us a few hours. While holding the tops of the wall, the bottoms started jumping out of the bottom rail. This wall wanted down, and we weren't stopping it. So, we let it go, and rushed to find our ratchet to take the 30-some bolts off. All the while, the sound of crunching metal ringing in our ears. Finally, the last bolt snapped out, and my husband began to coil the wall while I walked ahead, pulling the stabilizer bars off. The wind and rain were coming at us, and I'm sure we woke every neighbour while we shouted profanities at the sky! Finally we got the steel rolled up, and the 27ft circle of polystyrene came hurtling over us like a tent. Slowly we pushed it back down against the wind, cracking several pieces in the process. Here's what she looks like now....
) we filled half a cart with fittings!!
let me cry for you!
These two will be for when you are done!