A week ago I posted an advertisement on the San Marcos Craig’s List Free section:

We have an approximately 8,000 gallon above-ground swimming pool in our backyard. It’s shaped like this:

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It has served well for the seven years we’ve been in our house, but since we live only about 5 minutes from the river, we’ve decided to just go there when we want to have a swim instead of keeping up with a pool.

Thus, we’d like to give the pool to someone who will enjoy it. If you’re willing to come and break it down and take it, it’s yours. Skimmer, chlorinator, pump, lining, walls all included. We’ll also throw in any useful pool chemicals we still have around.

Please respond via email or call at 940 239 4202 if you’re interested so that we can give you the location and arrange a time. Thanks!

Once the advertisement went up, I had 5 responses within 10 minutes, and quickly yanked the ad back down. We did a little back and forth with a few people, and finally got things lined up for a family down in San Antonio with 3 young kids to come adopt it.

This was a hard decision for us, as we’ve gotten a ton of use out of the pool over the past several years. The kids all love to swim, and it made a great focal point for backyard parties. However, we had to run the pump pretty much continuously and dump in enormous quantities of chlorine to keep it blue during the hottest parts of summer. The electricity for that combined with chemicals and water added up to a goodly sum — money which seemed ridiculous to spend that way when we have a beautiful river so close by.

The father of the family that agreed to relocate the pool and one of his friends showed up on Sunday to tear the thing down. It ended up being a more formidable task than any of us had anticipated, and eventually required me to jump into the mucky swampwater that remained in it and scoop out the rotting leaf goop that had accumulated by hand. I kept expecting some sort of creature with an abundance of eyes and fins to pop out and strike up a conversation: “I say, what are you doing to my home? I’ve just got it set up the way I like it!”

Surprisingly, after about 5 hours of work, they decided that, since some of the metal bits were rusty, they didn’t want the pool after all. They toted away a fair chunk of the pool parts, but left us with a healthy pile of debris that we’ll be working on breaking down soon ourselves. Still, they contributed a long afternoon of free labor, so we’ve nothing to complain about!

Now the question is: what do we do with the space? Ideas floated so far: outdoor movie theater, garden, volleyball court, washers/horseshoes pit, and miniature golf course. Got any ideas? Let us know!