The Demise of the Pool - Part II

As seen in   The Demise of the Pool - Part I   the first jack hammer that we got (60 lb electric one) didn't do as good of a job as we would have liked. In an attempt to speed of the process, we decided to pull out the big guns and rent a 90 lb compressed air jack hammer. This one was definitely worth the money. Nate was able to destroy huge chunks of cement in minutes which took hours with the other one. The long wall of the pool was too long for us to take down all at once, so we broke it in half and took it down in pieces. We ran into a few snags along the way. The first was a very minor cut on my hand that resulted in a trip to the ER since I cut it on a rusty nail and haven't had a tetanus shot in 15 years. The second snag was something in the pool. While Nate was jack hammering the stairs out of the pool he came across this:

If you can't tell from the picture, that is a large bone. This bone was so large we didn't know what (or who) it might belong to. This resulted in a call to the police (yes we watch to many episodes of Bones) who sent over a very nice patrol cop on his bike. (This was the first indication that they may not have been taking us to seriously). The cop took a look and pretty much came to the same conclusion that we did, that the bone looked too big to be human but WHY would there be a large bone buried in the pool steps? Since he also was unsure if it was human or not he called his Sargent, who showed up in his car (step up in seriousness) and took a look for himself. After he also determined the same thing everyone else had and took some pictures, he let us continue with our work but made us avoid the area with the bone in it. At this point we had half of the big wall down so we started work on getting the other half down. We made multiple attempts at getting a video of this, but much to our dismay, it did not work any of the times. We got the other half of the wall down before the Sargent came back and had us jack hammer the bone out of the steps. He took it with him for evidence and let us finish our work. At this point the pool looked like this.

After a few more hours with the jack hammer we had everything broken up that we needed to and we were able to return the jack hammer, compressor and the U-Haul truck we needed to rent since we needed to tow the compressor in time to go to our first PawSox game with Jon and Katie!

While Nate was hammering away, I worked on putting the floor down in the porch. I wanted something that looked like tile, but also something durable and could handle cold temperatures. This landed me on laminate tiles. These things are really cool. They look like stone tiles and they can even be grouted! To reinforce the floor, we first laid a new subfloor.

We used a subfloor with a coating to prevent mold and grossness from forming. To help the tiles stick to the subfloor we used an adhesive that we just rolled on.

Once this dried I was able to put the tiles down which consisted of taking off the paper and sticking them down on the floor (super easy). This is the floor before grouting

And this is it after I grouted

It will look better once the grout is completely dry and I can mop the floor. This week we are renting a large tractor and moving the rest of the cement into the pool and getting fill so the pool will officially be gone! We are also putting the deck on this weekend so the next week should be a big week for our backyard.