Pool Liners....
 

Anyone ever installed their own? We bought a house last year and the liner really needs replacing. Sucks cause we should be out there swimming in our pool instead of staring at it! Its an above ground set into a deck. Its expensive to get it installed, seems the estimates are about $1000! We've done a lot of stuff ourselves (like put in our own retaining wall) and we did very well and saved some however, we are concerned that this may be a project a little too big for us.

Experiences?

We built our above ground pool so yes, we installed the liner ourselves. I researched a lot of the project and found some great pool forums (like 3FC but for pool obsessed people) that gave good tips. If you're DIY people, I see no reason why you can't do it yourselves. It's definitely not hard. Prep work is the most important. We put down a thick layer of sand (important to refresh your layer before replacing your old liner) and then put a Gorilla Pad on top of that for added protection. We also used foam pool coving around the edges to keep the liner from slipping out (many contractors build this coving with extra sand but the styrofoam coving was really easy).

The trickiest part was stepping carefully as we spread the liner so we didn't leave any big footprints or wrinkles. Also, you have to time the water delivery. We used our hose to fill the first couple of inches as we smoothed out the liner and then we had a water truck come and deliver the balance. Check YouTube for videos too. I just Googled like crazy and read everything I could find. I also found a blog where someone posted their step by step experience. Good luck with your decision!

Thank you for all that info!!!

DH looked up some sites on DIY. He did not say anything about the sand but the sites I looked at today did talk about that. Did you just order the sand from like a Home Depot, or it is like buying bags of play sand? I assume it needs to be very fine not to rip the liner.

We priced out a liner and the simple ones are like $300, and the installation is like $1000...omg. Yeah we did the retaining wall and it came out like a professional did it, if I might brag a little! lol But we did it over like a month.

How long did it take to do the liner? Was it an all day project? I assume when the old one get staken out you have to get the mew one in same day and can't the pool get rained in without the liner. IDK how we''d do under a time limit though. We tend to take a lond time to do projects only because with the kids, everything moves slowly around here lol.

But thanks again, hopefully we will get it done before the summer is over so we can close the pool properly and enjoy it never year!