Endless Pools

There was a grand plan behind the Endless Pool when I first bought it. Though in its initial stages, the plan's intended form now starts to appear recognizable, at least enough to preview it to the outside world.

The pool wasn't purchased just to swim in, but also to be the cornerstone of an integrated design. To understand it I must introduce you to the Slowtwitch Empfitheater. When I first bought the house I live in (it'll be 2 years next month) one thing became obvious. A part of the property wanted very badly to be an amphitheater. Not anything huge, something that would comfortably fit 150 or 200 people. No chairs or anything. Just soft pea gravel behind terrace buttresses on which to sit, or on which to place lawn chairs or cushions.

Further, my idea was to build it using almost no money. So I scoured the area on and around the 13 acres Monty and I bought for abandoned lumber, grounded telephone poles, split rails laying around, and leftover hardware to keep everything in place. River rock to accent it, cottonwood trees we bought for next to nothing.

And a lot of digging. Tons of dirt shoveled, tons of rock shoveled. One spadeful at a time.

It's half done. I've run out of items to pillage so now I have to pay money for materials but not to worry. I live in the land of "compounds," that is, we don't have subdivisions around here. Our neighbors live in personal enclaves like those the FBI occasionally surrounds. Fortunately, those who live in such places usually horde things, like unused building materials. I have my eye on several stacks and pallets of decorative cement block and railroad ties and such.

One must negotiate these deals with the wives if at all possible. The husbands want to keep hold of these treasures for the projects that only take flight in their mind's eyes. The wives just want that stuff out of there.

"Why do I need an amphitheater?" you might ask. I don't. That's not the point. Noah didn't need an Ark. At least he didn't know he needed it while he was building it.

Mine is not an amphitheater. It's an Empfitheater. There will be no other like it. The seating won't be egalitarian. There will be choice spots, though I don't know which seats those are yet. Those who'll return frequently to see the latest performances will know where these choice seats are and grab them early (no, I don't know what sort of performances yet).

There will be a first-rate sound system. There is already a tailor-made place for a stage, ringed by joshua trees.

There's also a sky box. I just finished it. In fact, it isn't quite finished. You can see the tools laying about, and I'm half done sanding the spruce planks before laying on two or three coats of wood protectant.

I'm also going to put an outdoor—reasonably elegant—dinner table on the skybox's deck, seating six or eight. Teak, perhaps. The skybox also features a bar, which I made out of redwood, that currently has four coats of polyurethane, the last two of which had a rubdown with four-ought steel wool. Then a coat of wax. It's like glass. You can push beer mugs back and forth on it.

The sky box is at one end of the arc-shaped Empfitheater, overlooking the terraced benches. At the other end is the Endless Pool. It's integrated into the Empfitheater—sits at the very top—and the idea is for people to lay about on the deck listening and watching whatever it is that's happening on the stage below.

The deck pictured just beneath, attached to one end of the Endless Pool. It's also made of spruce planks, and when you ascend the stairs (at left) that lead up from the base of the Empfitheater to its top, the final rung sets you onto the lowest level of the deck. Then there's two levels of deck above that.

I'm not nearly finished with this deck. Last night I brushed two coats of wood protectant on the deck's highest level. I also just finished a river rock wall that will continue around and form a room in front of the pool that will house the pool's equipment (heater, filtering system, the electric motor that runs the propulsion unit). The "roof" of this river rock room will be made of spruce planks atop plywood that is hinged at one end, so that I can lift these panels up like the hood of a car and enter and work on the equipment inside. The deck will eventually ring the entire pool, however I've only got one side going at the moment.

There is a 2" PVC pipe that runs from the floor of this river rock equipment room underground, and empties into one of the Empfitheater's terraced rows, to drain the equipment room should rainwater get inside, or should the pool spring a leak.

You might remember that I buried my Endless Pool halfway into the ground. I then insulated the outside pool walls and pushed dirt up against the lower two feet of the pool. In order to have a solid foundation for the deck I laid two rows of concrete block, both parallel to the wall of the pool. One row of block was adjacent to the pool. The other row was several feet from the pool (where the deck would terminate). Both rows of block were at ground level, that is, I dug a pair of trenches one block deep, and the cement block was placed end-to-end in the trench so that the top of this row of block was level with the ground.

Actually, the trenches were dug slightly deeper, so that when I poured concrete into each trench I could lay the blocks on a couple inches of wet concrete, and position each block level and true with a string that was brought tight and spanned the entire length of the deck I intended to build.

My blocks were 6" wide, and after the concrete had dried I then poured concrete into the blocks themselves, and filled up the space in each trench on either side of each the block to a point about halfway up the height of the block (I didn't want those blocks moving at all, as this was my deck's footer). When everything was dry I attached a 2"x6" douglas fir plank along the entire length of each block row.

I then took 2"x12" planks of fir and cut a stair into each of them. These were my floor joists. One end of the joist was supported by one of the concrete block rows, the other end by the other row. To support the joists on end I used a pair of brackets opposite each other between every other row of joists. I attached the vertical edge of each bracket to the joist (as you can see in the photo adjacent), and the horizontal edge to the 2"X6" footer that lay atop the row of cement block (the joists sit 16" apart). A smaller set of brackets were attached to the other end of each pair of joists—they needed to be smaller because they couldn't protrude above the level of the cut stair.

I affixed a 2"x3" header to the pool wall, right at the top. I then took 2"x12" fir planks and stood them on end, so that when vertical they came right up to the edge of the header. They were cut so that they terminated level with the top of the pool, and each plank lay right on the footer. Each plank was bolted to a joist, and these planks acted as the final step up to the pool's edge, and as a joist for the deck planks that would edge top of the pool. L-brackets attached these 2"x12" joists to the pool's header.

Then I screwed 3" deck screws into 2"x6" spruce fascia (rough on one side smooth on the other). Voila, pool deck. No it's not perfect. But, I did it myself, so the labor was cheap, and you get all the satisfaction out of doing something that you could've contracted out and have gotten finished much more quickly and professionally. I wouldn't have done it any other way.

The river rock wall, well, that's just a bunch of concrete block forming a wall, rebar, all that stuff, faced with smooth rock stolen from my neighbor's property. A couple of wheelbarrows full of mortar and you're in business (though the easier way to do it would've been to affix some lath paper with chicken wire to the concrete block. The mortar doesn't stick very well to the block surface. I didn't use the lath paper and my wall will probably pay for it down the line.

Thing is, you can't be selfish about projects like this. If you want to make for yourself a stylish outdoorsy pool like I did, you can't ignore the needs of the family. So, adjacent to the Endless Pool is the doggie pool. I've just begun this. River rock and concrete, with a deep end just deep enough so that Charlee can get all four paws off the bottom, and a shallow end that Moonie can lay down in (he doesn't like to swim). It'll have a little creek that flows into it, and Steve Hed is sending me a 2000 gallon per hour pond pump for the purpose. Water falls, little wooden mill wheels, all that stuff. So far, the deep end is about half done, and there's a piece of flexible 2" PVC that was concreted into the sidewall of the deep end, just above floor level, though which the pond pump's water return tube and electrical cord will pass.

When it's all done, it'll integrate. The Endless Pool, the Empfitheater, the dog pond, the skybox, and other stuff I'm building. It's a pretty big project, all told, so I thought I'd break this up into two or three segments, this being the first phase. When I figure out what we'll actually use the Slowtwich Empfitheater for, I'll let you know where you can buy tickets.