Natural Swimming Pool, Stage 3

Natural Swimming Pool

If you have been following the construction of our natural swimming pool, then you know that we have now reached the point of FINALLY adding our liner! We chose an EPDM pond liner because it is the most UV resistant. There are others out there that are maybe a little less expensive, but we get a LOT of really hot sun and we have virtually no shade so…. EPDM it is.

Manhandling the Liner

Having said that, these liners are crazy heavy! When I designed our natural swimming pool, I ordered the liner in three sections. I ordered a 15’x45′ piece for the regeneration area, a 20’x20 for the shallow end, and a 40’x50′ for the deep end. Needless to say, the big one took some serious manhandling to get in place. Luckily, we’ve got some ‘toxic masculinity’ in the family! (OK, Don’t freak out, that was just a joke…)

Seaming the Liner

As a note of how you are actually supposed to do this thing, the manufacturer suggests laying the multiple pieces on a flat surface and piecing them together before putting them in place. That simply was not a possibility for us. Our pool is just too big for that and it just would not work, so we were forced to do it in place. The next step is to seam the pieces together. There are specific products that will do this and steps to take.

First, you scrub the liner in the area to be seamed and then wipe it down with alcohol. Then, you apply a primer, as pictured. Once the primer has dried (become tacky), adhere the 3″ double-sided tape to one side of the liner and roll it in place.

Then go back and do it all over again to the other side. Once that is done, you go back over it with the same cleaning and alcohol method, then the primer and a 6″ one-sided tape to cover the seam. We did this with both of our two seams, allowing a 24-hour cure time.

Side Note – Where to find these products

With a quick internet search, you can find quite a few companies that sell pond liners and their accessories, however, after a lot of searching, I purchased mine from Just Liners. I will say a few things about them.

They have everything you will need, their products are reasonably priced and they ship quickly. I am not tied to them in any way and here’s how you can be assured of that…their website is HORRIBLE. So, if you feel like wading through their atrocious website to find what you need, then you will find yourself a good deal with this company. Enough said.

Once the liner was seamed up and sealed, we pulled it up and cut around the deck framing, continuing to tuck and fold the excess into place. In a natural swimming pool, utilizing a pond liner, there will always be folds. This is something that is fine with us and adds to the natural effect. We just tried to minimize the amount of them.

Continuing the Deck Framing

When the liners were in, we had a great deal more framing to continue before we could do what we really wanted to do…ADD WATER!!! So, we continued framing. When we initially cemented our posts, we ran them wild, which just means that we installed excess so that we were sure to have enough and we cut them off once we installed the rim joists.

We measured, leveled, and marked where the outer rim joists should be and installed them. Then we measured, marked, and installed the deck joists, as pictured above. We are using a cantilevered design for the deck around the pool.

On one end of the pool, we have designed in a pier from which there will be a great deal of diving and jumping, therefore it needed a great deal more support. We made it longer and with several posts and multiple layered joists which were bolted through instead of screwed. The pier also serves another purpose, as it holds a shelf underneath for our skimmer…we will get more into that later as well.

Plumbing the Natural Swimming Pool

During the framing process, we also had to jump into the plumbing. In a natural swimming pool, you don’t want your water to circulate as often as it does in a chlorinated pool. So, I chose a 1.5 hp pump, which isn’t much for a 35,000-gallon pool.

We located our pump house next to the pier at the deep end of the pool so that we could pull the water directly from there and run it under the decking straight to the regeneration area which would then bleed out through the perforated pipes that we talked about in our last post. It was a very straightforward plumbing situation and didn’t take that long. We used 2″ PVC and a Pentair Superflo pump.

Within the plumbing, we also had to construct a skimmer to clean the top of the water. I looked around at skimmers. They are all crazy expensive and we are intelligent and crafty people. I knew that we could build something way cheaper that would work just as well….so we did.

I’ll do a video and blog specifically about how we did that, soon! But here’s the broad scope; we made a shelf under the pier to hold it, as pictured above. We used a plastic bin and a submersible pump, flowing out to the side of our pool where we created a little waterfall. (The added soothing sounds are great!) It didn’t take long at all and it was very cheap!

Adding the Electric Line

We designed our pump house to be in fairly close proximity to our electrical box so that we wouldn’t have to run power too terribly far. Our Oklahoma clay is like digging through concrete so less is better!

Kris used a pick-ax to get through it-in 100-plus-degree weather, and we ran the power into the pump house with multiple plugins to accommodate all of the accessories that we would need. The boys even got in on the action after the fact and did some cover-up for us. There will actually be a stone patio going in over the top of it when all is said and done.

Don’t Miss These Videos of The Ongoing Updates of This Process!

These video updates give you the up close ‘show and tell’ updates along the way. You don’t want to miss them!

And be sure and leave us your feedback! We would love to hear from you! Do you have questions or comments? Have you or are you thinking about building a natural swimming pool? Let us hear from you!

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