The Pool Equipment Platform Project

When we moved in here, our pool equipment was sitting in a little ditch between our deck and our neighbor's fence. Our neighbor's hemlock trees and mulberry trees, growing up against the fence, rained needles, cones and leaves upon them. They were also at the mercy of many pesky denizens of the soil. Rainy weather churned up mud and sand which covered everything. The final insult: the channel between the deck and the trees funneled the wind, like a big gritty Venturi tube, right into the heater's pilot light area.

About a month after we moved in, when our sanity began to slowly return, I realized that this situation needed to be corrected. Only two years later, with my father-in-law's help, we built a concrete platform on which to mount the equipment. Starting with a base of wet sand, we built it using three layers of concrete blocks. We used 8X16 blocks for the bottom layer, and 8X4 blocks for the second layer. The top is finished in 16X16X2 concrete pavers, which I mortared onto the top layer of blocks. We also drove iron stakes in the ground around the base layer to keep it from shifting. I was especially pleased at how we came exactly to the level of the deck - the layer of mortar finished things off exactly right.

For the electrical conduit entry, I sliced off a section of each block to clear the place where it came out of the ground. For the paver layer, I had to slice the paver into three sections, then I cut the narrowest section into three pieces as well and discarded one of them.

After the pavers were motared into place, I added water to the remaining mortar and poured it along the joints; then I used a broom to even it out. This was done mostly for appearance, and to reduce the amount of water which will get between the top and second layers.

In these pictures, the patchy appearance of the surface is mostly due to shadows and varying degrees of wetness; there is also some posterization on one shot where I enhanced the contrast too much. Click on each one for a larger view; the large views are between 24 Kb ("from deck") and 72 Kb ("Close Up").

For the next step, I'm looking for a ready-made enclosure of some sort to put over it all. I'd like to use a metal prefab shed with dimensions 6 feet by 4 feet, with a door on the longer side.