20 Years After This Man Began Building His Dream Pool, His Incredible Creation Blew The Town’s Mind
Aspirations are tricky things. We can spend our whole lives trying to achieve our goals, but many of us end up falling short. Micky Thornton didn’t fall short, though – not by a long chalk. Ever since he was a young boy, his one burning ambition was to build an incredible swimming pool. He never stopped trying to make his dream a reality, and when it finally came to fruition the result left his community spellbound.
At age ten, most of us have simple desires: we covet new toys, new books and a later bedtime. However, when Micky Thornton was little he wanted one thing, and one thing only: a gigantic swimming pool. But he was just a boy, and big ambitions like that would have to wait.
Speaking to WREG-TV, Thornton described his vision. “To start with, I probably had the idea when I was nine or ten years old,” he said. “I wanted [the pool] large in the deep end but large and deep enough you could swim around it and not feel like you are trapped in a little box.”
That ten-year-old had to wait another 29 years to begin making his idea a reality. In fact, it was when Thornton made the move to Covington, Tennessee, that he saw the opportunity to get cracking on his pool. And in 1993 he made a start.
Thornton wasn’t going to be able to build a massive pool overnight, though. In fact, his first efforts produced something more akin to a large hole – albeit one 20 feet deep. It was very much a DIY affair and relied on a simple polyethylene mat rather than a professional lining or tiles to make it watertight.
