Pool Waterslide

What's the best way to improve fun in your pool? Yes, add a waterslide to it.

As every pool and every back garden is different, this is more inspirational then complete plan. You will have to adopt it to your backyard specs!

Step 1: Do Some Planing

I have the luck that next to my swimming pool there is a little hill.So I didn't have to build the wood construction to the complete height of the slide.

The length of the slide is exactly 8,20 (4x 2,05cm OSB boards) and the height is 280cm. This provides a very good sliding experience :)

I used Sktechup for the initial 3D planing, see attached file.

Step 2: Buy All the Required Stuff

The stuff you require will depend on your requirements and circumstances.

I needed:

• 14x beams (7cm x 7cm)
• Ground anchors (for 7cm beams).
• 4x OSB boards (205cm, 67cm, 22mm thick)
• rug
• fishpond foil (1mm, 8 m long, 1m wide)
• Approx. 150 wood screws (6mm x 50mm)
• 8 planks for the handrails (10cm x 200cm x 25mm)

All together I spent approx. 300 € for all the material.

Step 3: Build the Slide Wooden Structure

So I started with the ground anchors: put the first one in on top of the hill, with a distance 67cm, the same as the OSB boards. The vertical distance I choose approx. 80 cm. that looked close enough to build a stable structure.

In my initial plans, I had a slide with one kink. As building the slide in real live, I saw it was easier to build it with 2 kinks, to follow the hill.

I found that it's really hard to put in the anchors precisely: a lot of them were a bit tilted or not exactly 67cm apart. Several of the beams I had to cut a little bit, to make them flexible left / right, to make them the 67cm of the OSB boards.

Once the beams were in, I added a cord scaffold. This helped me finding the right heights for the crossbeams.

I added crossbeams and decided on which beams I had to do the kinks.

After adding the boards, the whole structure gained already a lot of rigidity.

On some beams I also added vertical and horizontal cross beams.

Before finally screwing the boards to the cross beams, I added the planks for the handrail. This again added a lot of rigidity and also straightened the OSB boards.

Step 4: Cover It With Foil

First I added some carpet on the wooden construction, to make the sliding as smooth as possible. I am not sure if this really helps, you might not have to add this.

Then I added the foil: I used 1mm black foil used for fishponds. I attached it with a stapler on the side and the top of the slide.

Add a water hose and ready you are :-)

Step 5: (most Important) Test & Have Fun!