In the Spring of 2021 I started digging a hole in the backyard of my newly purchased home in Running Springs, CA in hopes of building a glorious organic swimming pool, just like the one’s on David Pagan Butler’s YouTube channel, but smaller, 10’x 12′ to be exact. I dug until winter came, and when Spring of 2022 sprung, I was anxious to finish it, but I screwed up, twice.
Building an organic pool is actually not that hard, there’s just some stuff you need to know before you begin.
Like you, I’m drawn to swimming in fresh water or oceans more so than a chlorinated swimming pool and jacuzzi.
Maybe you don’t mind your skin absorbing the chemical concoction that keeps a typical household swimming pool ‘clean’, but I do, maybe I’m crazy.
With an organic pool, you’re basically building a pond but with no fish. Otherwise you’d be swimming in their poo. The plants you choose however will regulate the growth of algae and bacteria and the bubble pumps you install will add the oxygen and circulation needed to replicate a natural eco system that you’d find at a creek or lake.
With a shovel and a pick axe I dug a hole about 3.5 feet deep, like the shallow end of a swimming pool.
I wanted the design to be like a bench inside the water so that when you’re sitting down the water would be up to your neck. The reason it is 10’x 12′ is because in my county, thats the maximum size you can build something without needing a permit. So it’s not a swimming pool, because it’s not big enough to swim around in, it’s just a pool big enough for a few friends to hang out in and cool off.
As soon as I finished digging my hole I had to level it out and build the perimeter walls with cinder blocks. I’ve done concrete work once before with my friend Jeremy. We built a DIY skate spot in Bristol, PA we called the REP215 spot. We made a quarter pipe and a few wild ledges out of concrete. He taught me how to mix concrete and lay blocks, but that was like 15 years ago so I was excited to see how this would turn out.
At first though, I bought the wrong concrete. I bought the kind with rocks in it, not the mortar I actually needed for stacking cinder blocks. So I had to get another shipment of bags of mortar delivered from Lowe’s to the house, which I over estimated by a lot. If you need mortar and concrete I have so much left over, let me know.
I finished the 44″x 44″ bench in the middle first, it’s about 18″ high, which is good chair height for me since I’m only 5′ 6″. Next was the outer walls. The far outside perimeter wall was kinda hard to keep level and square, I kinda screwed up a bit, but no one will ever notice. That wall is 24″ tall and 10 feet wide by 12 feet long.
I built another wall inside that outer wall to hold the planted zone in. It was 16″ tall and about 8 feet wide by 10 feet long, but this was my BIG mistake. I didn’t know it at the time, but folding a liner over top of that inner planted zone wall was going to be impossible.
I bought a 30 mil RPE pond liner from everythingponds.com that is suppose to be stronger and last longer than the rubber pond liner that people typically use. It was so hard to fold. I remember holding that thing above my head getting under the liner trying to fit it in the creases around each of those walls. It was a pain. I couldn’t get it to fold over the walls so I was compelled to cut it into pieces!
I cut this thing into like 8 big pieces, and since this liner is heat welded together at the factory I thought I’d give that a shot. I bought a heat gun to weld the pieces to each other, folding the liner over top of the planted zone walls heating the underside of the liner and adhering it to the one below it, after I was done with all the welds I rolled some sealant over top of it all.
Confident that this pool is leak free I put in my bubble pumps, my gravel and my sand, even my plants. I ran the hose into the backyard and filled it with water.
Right away I noticed water was going down but, for some reason my pride was protecting me from the cold hard truth that this damn liner had a leak, several leaks!
I kept letting it fill up to the top, excited it was all finished I got into the murky water and splashed around with joy, only to wake up the next morning to about 6″ of water missing. So I filled it up again, thinking that maybe the pond is settling, but again my pride was protecting me from facing the failure of my pond liner job. That 6″ of water turned to 10″ then 12″ of water missing, finally after digging a hole beside the pond to see if any water was leaking I saw it.
Water was definitely leaking because that hole was filling up with water. Disappointment hit me like a ton of bricks. My stomach turned and I just went to bed to think about what to do next. In the morning I bought a pump to get the water out of there and started shoveling all the sand and gravel out of there, 2 tons of it.
It took all day shoveling it out, draining the pool, and mopping up all the water. The next day I had to clean up all the dirt because my plan was to reseal the liner with more sealant! I thought I could seal the leak with putty, glue and tape, so that’s what I did.
The following week I went over those welds I made with water proof glue, let it dry, and then went over that again with rubber paste twice, then finally, 2 coats of rubber sealant the same stuff I used the first time around. There was no way this thing was going to leak, but it did.
I threw in all the gravel and sand again, but left out the plants and filled it with water. I spent so much time sealing it, but I knew that if it leaked I would have to rip everything out. I didn’t think it would leak though so I wasn’t planning on that since I spent hundreds on sealing it again!
Well, the pool didn’t look like it was leaking so I started to add the plants again, but when I woke up in the morning, the water dropped so dramatically that I just became helpless.
I failed, again. Two times I filled this pool up and both times it leaked.
My dad told me to just fill it with dirt! I wanted to, but two set backs made me rethink the design entirely.
I was gonna tear out everything to have no 90 degree angles in the design so that the next liner wouldn’t be difficult to fold at all, but I settled on just removing the inner planted zone wall. If that wall was gone it’d be easier to fold the liner and I would just build that wall on top of the liner.
So after a few days of contemplating my next move I took a razor blade to the liner and ripped it out of there. It was such a surreal experience tearing out something I put so many hours into, but it had to be done.
Accept defeat and carry on.
After the liner was removed I needed to demolish the inner wall, and while I was doing that, I was thinking of “Tear down the wall, tear down the wall” some lyrics from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. There was some symbology there and again some wild feeling of destroying something that took so long to build. I had some profound insight in doing that. Maybe it goes something like, “pride can blind you”.
Whatever the insight is, so be it. I learned something from these failures that if I put it into words for you, it’d be somehow less of a lesson for me, so just have some empathy for guy who desperately wanted to finish a project but had to destroy it first to finish it. Or not, I’m not asking for your sympathy.
My calculation was correct though removing that wall, the liner folded over the other walls much easier, but there was a point where I thought it wasn’t going to work. I pressed on though, it had to work this time. After the fold was finished I put the over liner on top and filled in the little bench area with water to let sit for a day to see if it leaks again.
No leaks, so now I had to rebuild the inner wall. I was going to use cinder blocks again, but that would’ve taken too long so I just bought some 4×6’s from a lumber yard. I cut those and screwed them together to make an inner wall. I just didn’t notice that the wood would float!
I stacked heavy rocks I found in the yard onto the corners of it to weigh it down. It actually looks more natural that way. I proceeded to install the bubble pumps and the substrate layer in the planted zone to replant all the grasses and Irises. The next morning I was so scared to see if the water level dropped. I walked slowly to the patio and looked over the railing to see that the water held it’s level! ‘
The nightmare was over in that moment and the project is done. All I had to do is clean up the area around it, and decorate it with some gnomes. I accomplished a task after failing multiple times. If it were any other situation I probably would’ve stopped after the first failure, but I think it was the hole itself that made me not want to stop. I wasn’t going to leave a big hole as a reminder of my failures in my backyard. In the end my pride didn’t just get in my way, it helped me see the project through to the end.
I did realize a week or so after I finished the pool, that a soft wood like Douglas Fir will not last very long underwater. Good thing I didn’t choose.. oh wait.
