I’m not referring to the cover as white trash, because, this time, I really feel like I did a good job. See, when I bought the house, the hot tub was covered only by that lame solar heating cover (which looks like the sheets of plastic bubble wrap). And this did NOTHING to keep the hot tub clean, because you couldn’t actually remove the cover without all the pine needles and leaves falling into the hot tub. So my first attempt at a cover was to build a PVC pipe frame that the solar heating cover was stretched over. And this did initally work. But soon after the first major rain, I realized a couple problems.

1) Water will collect on the cover (despite my attempts at building it so rain would roll off).
2) Water will make it impossible to remove the cover, or you will break the PVC frame trying to lift the cover to drain the water off.
3) Large falling sticks will impale this cover and render it ripped and worthless.

So, I let it sit there for a while. Too long, really. So long that I had to drain the thing with buckets because the pump would have clogged, choked, or otherwise burnt up trying to suck in so damn many leaves. :(

But once we cleaned it, we realized we had an old problem on our hands again.

Kamikaze squirrels.

You think I am making this up, but I am not. Squirrels are pretty stupid rodents, I guess, because they will jump into the hot tub (BONZAI!) and try to drown themselves. Before the first, PVC frame cover, I had three squirrel deaths, and two near misses (my wife fished them out with the net before they drowned). The dead ones are buried over where the bottle brushes are now, in case any of you care to visit with the deceased. The lives ones probably still morn their squirrelly brethern, lost in the “Battle of Red Cedar Place.”

This is why I had to build the first cover. And yes, yes, I could have bought a cover, but hot tub covers tend to be heavy and you can never use it alone, because you’ll put your back out if you try to move anything 9′x9′ made of wood all by yourself. And where do you put it when not in use? Plus, they are expensive! I understand why a hot tub heater is $800 or so. But why the hell is the cover $300? It’s WOOD with a vinyl cover!

So, being that sort of “alternative materials” kind of guy that I am, the first thing I did was I went to the hardware store and got a tarp. I had already fished one near-casualty out of the tub that morning, so I needed to get SOMETHING to cover the thing.

I found a nice, brown 8′6″ x 10′ tarp, brought it home, and bungee corded the thing over the tub. So now, instead of a watery grave, the squirrels now had a trampoline!

This worked for a couple of days, but it really didn’t look so hot, and still had the water drainage problem.

My next thought was… what if I set up the tarp with a pulley, so I could just pull the tarp up into the air on the one side? It could be used as a privacy screen when it was up!

A little experimenting with this made me realize that this was a bad idea. There are no trees in the right position above the hot tub, and it also had the double-bad issue of having exposed lines that could be seen from the outside world. Just what I need– the deed restriction board after my ass.

So I pondered for a little while, and then, I realized that what the tarp needed was to be retractable, like venetian blinds. One person should be able to pull the handle and pull back the tarp, much the same way that venetian blinds come up when you pull the cord.

And you would need to have something sturdy on the far end of the tarp so that you could pull the tarp back across. Additionally, you would need to have at least two crossbars so that the tarp wouldn’t just fall into the tub. These crossbars could be the folding points for the tarp when it was pulled back.

So, using the PVC from the failed, earlier cover, I built three 8′6″ PVC poles with caps on the end. I threaded clothesline through the tarp and PVC poles, then ran the clothesline through a system of pulleys so that at the far end, there was a handle. I built the handle out of a short length of PVC (with two endcaps) and voila! She is done.

Wanna see it? Then tune in next time for another exciting episode of… Home Improvement at Red Cedar Place.