Our Stealth Semi Inground Pool Story- Post 1

Hi Friends! I haven’t been the best about updating my blog lately. As always, I am aiming to change that! I want to do a series on our semi inground pool that we had installed this past September.

Have you guys ever heard of these? They are pretty neat! We looked into having a fully inground- real deal- pool installed but that price point was WAY beyond our budget. I began looking around at local pool businesses and found the semi inground option. They are a bit pricier then an above ground pool. But they could be fully buried inground if you so choose (or if your landscape allows it). So we settled on a 24 foot round that is 54 inches deep. They had other fun shapes like kidney bean or oval, but round was the cheapest, so we went that route. Are you sensing a pattern here? We were wanting a tropical backyard oasis that didn’t break the bank!

After waiting several months it was finally install day! Which quickly turned into a nightmare. As it turned out, our pool company has quite a sneaky way of making extra money. We paid to have the pool as deep as it could go, but they hit rock. The mother load of blue limestone! The pool company doesn’t dig out rock unless you have DEEP pockets…I mean DEEP. So we hired a local county man to come break up the rock for us. He was very kind and didn’t charge nearly as much as the pool company wanted! After several more costly hiccups, and a few weeks, we finally had the pool installed! Since then we have busy working on a massive fence project around the pool, installing tons of crushed rock, making ONE cedar planter box (5 more are to come!).

Tomorrow we are scheduled to get a big concrete patio poured around the pool. We had several quotes ranging anywhere from 5-6k, but the man we went with is less then half that. We took a chance on him… next time I pop on here I’ll tell you how it went. Ha! I’m hopeful he will do an amazing job!

All that back story brings me to today. We needed to do a small project on the pool before the patio could be poured. You know how above ground pools come with that plastic ring around the top?

 

With semi in ground pools, this ring can come right off and be replaced with stone! Visually, it makes the pool more like an inground one. This little project couldn’t be easier. You just pop the little plastic screw covers off and remove all the screws. The large plastic ring will lift off, one section at a time.

I’ve had several people wonder about how a semi inground pool actually works. It’s basically a metal shell and a thick, plastic liner. Believe it or not, this is actually a very popular way to do fully inground pools as well! Of course those are a bit deeper, but the process is the same. The liner is the only thing that will need maintained. It should last at least 10 years before it needs to be changed. The liner is stretched up and sits under the thin metal ring, so you can add stone right up to that ring without disturbing anything.

 

This is what it looks like under the plastic ring. We are going to lay our stone down right on top of that outside metal so we added a little liquid nails to secure them.

  

What a difference right? And there is literally no construction involved. You simply take the ring off, and glue the stones down! All the rock to the left in these photos will be concrete tomorrow. The concrete will come right up to the very edge, level with the stone.

I’m so excited to get the patio poured tomorrow! It’s really going to kick start us into finishing this big outdoor project.