Pallet Pool, Part 1

How (not) to Build a Pallet Pool

My wife was bemoaning the summer ahead..."Covid restrictions, you'll be working, the kids and I will have nothing to do." So she ordered a pool. Our backyard is not too big...about 16 feet wide...so she ordered a 14' diameter pool on Amazon. However for whatever reason the company was not able to fulfill the order...so we were back with no pool. All pools that we looked for after that were either the wrong size or too shallow.

Her friend sent us a link or two about homemade pools. At first I was pretty skeptical - one of the links showed someone digging a big hole and lining it with a tarp. No thanks. But then I found a few sites that showed pallet pools. Pallets are free all over the place. With the cost of lumber skyrocketing, it seemed like a good fit...

I found some pallets on Craigslist. They were all the same size (44"x56"). I figured, go big or go home, let's make a pool that we can actually swim in instead of a dinky 8 foot circle, so I picked up two truckloads and set them up.

(Ironically, that is our 'pool table' in the middle there...)

Once I had a basic design (elongated octagon) it was time to dig. Our backyard had a slight slope so more dirt needed to be removed on one side than the other. I wanted the pallets to be set slightly into the yard to keep them from moving around, but I was too lazy to dig deeper than a shovelful...we dug about 8 inches on one side and 3 or 4 inches on the other.

Once the ground was fairly level, with piles of dirt all around, I bought half a yard of gravel (crusher chips) and carried it one bucket at a time, through our townhouse (we don't really have backyard access), to the back, dumped it out, and Kate smoothed it out with a rake. There was only a couple of inches of gravel at the most, but it was enough to pack down and give us a solid, smooth-ish foundation.

Levelling is very important because a pool is unforgiving when it shows you if you are out of level. Water is a built-in level! I taped a 2-foot spirit level to a long stick and scraped it around for awhile until I was satisfied.

Next I set up the pallets. I screwed them together with a few 3" deck screws, mostly so they wouldn't fall down, not for any structural reason. I set them on the gravel and then later bought more gravel to fill in the space behind the pallet. The main reason for using gravel instead of earth was to hopefully help with drainage--I didn't want the pallets to rot too quickly in the ground. I did pile on the dirt after a few inches of gravel, however.

And that is it for part 1. It was a fair amount of work on some hot days; looking forward to getting it done! And so far it cost about $40 for gravel...so cheap, what could go wrong???