Last week I showed you how we prepared the base for our above ground pool. This week I’m going to show you how we installed the feet, and put up the walls. Let me tell you now, this was an absolutely exhausting day. We had Tony’s parents help us, but it was still a long, tiring, and somewhat frustrating process.

*I worked in collaboration on this project with Pool Supplies Canada,who provided me with a discount on pool parts. All opinions are my own*

Prepare the base

Last week we ended off at this point with a flat and level base of crushed stone. We wanted the base to be well supported so took our time getting this part right.

Lay out the feet and bottom rails

The next step is to find the locations for the pool feet. For our 27 foot round pool, we had 19 feet and 19 bottom rails. We roughly laid the feet out about 12.5 feet from the center of the pool, and slid the bottom rails into the feet.

Make sure that the rails are all the way into the feet to get an accurate size of the circle. Then we adjusted the circle to make sure it was completely round and all the feet were in the right location.

Place paving stones

We marked the location where each of the feet were, then took away the feet and bottom rails. We bought some flat paver stones and put them where each foot was (we sort of screwed up this step and ended up with some paver stones in the wrong location, but didn’t realize till later on when it was too late to fix. 

Then we dug down a few inches and sunk the pavers into the crushed stone. We used a transit to check and make sure that all the pavers were at the correct height, within 1 inch of every other stone.

Put together bottom rail again and dump sand inside

Once the paver stones were in place and level, we put the feet and bottom rails back in their place. There are no screws that keep these parts together. This makes it easier for the circle to be adjusted after the walls go up.

Before we did the walls, Tony dumped a few loads of sand inside the pool. It’s easier to get the sand inside with a tractor rather than shovel it over the walls.

Put up the steel walls

This next part was the most difficult for us. The above ground pool walls come in a really long roll, and it’s very heavy and difficult to maneuver. We had Tony’s parents help us for that day, and it took several of us to move the walls into the right spot, carefully unroll it, while also trying to gently drop it into the bottom rails. We didn’t find it easy. The walls kept popping out of the bottom rails as we moved along and as the wind picked up. In hindsight, a few extra hands would have been good even just to hold the wall in place.

I don’t have a lot of pictures of this stage of the process, but I’ll be coming out with a video next week with all the steps for installing your own above ground pool.

Once we got the walls up we braced it with whatever we had available, and took a much needed break.

It was tiring and frustrating, but we did it! Next week I’ll show you what we did to install the pool liner, and finish it off the above ground pool with the legs and top rails.