In October of 2005 we moved to a new house with a yard big enough to put in a pool. In October of 2006, we finally started construction. We were fortunate to find a house in a cul-de-sac with an odd-shaped lot with a side yard just the right size for a small pool. We thought this would be a great way to keep the pool safely gated away from the rest of the yard so the kids could safely play in the yard when we're not swimming. In the year that we lived in the house before pool construction, we rarely used the side yard, which had been used by the previous owners for RV parking, so we never felt we were giving up a big chunk of the yard for a pool.
And so, pool construction began. Here are some photos from the project and a little bit about the project. It went pretty quickly, less than the time promised by the pool contractor. It would have gone even faster, but we had to rework the sprinklers and we had some problems with that. I took some video in interval format, which would record a little video snippet every minute or whatever I timed it to, and I hopefully will have a time-lapse video of the whole project eventually. One day I accidentally taped in regular format, so I have a lot of editing to do.
This first picture here is the before picture. You can see the side of the house on the left, and we're looking from the back yard toward the front yard.
Another before picture. This picture is from the front of the side yard looking toward the back yard. Those big bushy green things are the "wild" tomatoes that grew from the seeds from the neighbor's last year's tomatoes. They were really yummy. Giant cherry tomatoes.
This little machine is the Bobcat that did the major digging of the pool. The kids loved watching it and even made up a little song about it.
After the hole was dug, they installed rebar, and this is what that looked like! I took this picture at night, so I had to lighten it on the computer, that's why it looks funny.
A few days after the rebar was installed, the gunite was blown in. That was a really dusty, messy process, and I had to cover the video camera with plastic wrap. You can see in the picture that they're blowing it in with a hose and they had big tarps up all over to keep the concrete from getting all over the place.
And in this one you can see it all done. You can see the hot tub at the other end. It's the same level as the rest of the pool. The pool is three feet right next to the steps, closest to the camera, then it goes down to five feet where the drain pipes are, then it goes back up to four feet over at the other end. They call this a "sport pool", I guess because you can play games like volleyball in it. We don't have any tall features or a diving board, so we thought this was the best for kids to be able to stand up in most of the pool and play.
Jumping ahead a bit, here's a picture of the pool with the flagstone coping and the concrete deck around it. The flagstone is called Bouquet Canyon. The deck is the Davis Concrete color Mesa Buff. In case you care. The deck is a salt finish, where they throw rock salt onto the concrete and roll it into create the little indents.
After the concrete was done, we put in a fence to cut off the pool area from the rest of the yard. We put it in ourselves, to save money. It was pretty easy, once we got a hold of a hammer drill. Thank heaven for Home Depot's Tool Rental! The fence looks kind of funny because you can see where we sprayed primer on the spots we drilled. We'll paint them black when we get around to it!
So, after the coping and concrete and fence were put in, they did the interior finish. We have a pebble finish, Gemstone color Blue Granite Tahoe. The pictures show the whole pool, and also a close-up of the finish. This first picture is from the hot tub end looking backwards. You can see the steps and the Acapulco shelf (that's the big wide step.) The pebble finish gives the water a very pretty blue color. In the picture of the whole pool, it looks bluer than it really is, because the plaster around the pebbles is a light blue, and it's in the evening in shadow.
Close up of the pebble finish.
And, finally, some pictures of the completed pool full of water.
This photo is from the backyard looking toward the front. The water looks really reflective, but it's really easy to see to the bottom when you're standing next to it.
A slightly skewed picture of the spa and pool. You can see the clarity of the water in the spa. The whole pool looks like that in person.
And one more picture of the pool looking toward the back yard end with our beautiful fence in the background (and the orange construction barrier that had so much dirt piled on it by various workers that we can't get it out without a lot of digging and we're just not there yet):
Some technical specs:
Volume: the pool holds about 11,400 gallons of water, the hot tub about 315 gallons.
Pool Perimeter: 75 feet , the hot tub 19 feet.
Pool Area: 365 sq. ft., hot tub 28 sq. ft.