Looks great. That is some fast progress you have going on. Dig, plumb, and rebar in one day is amazing. Keep em coming.

Wow! Beautiful design. I love the way the spa spills onto the sunshelf. I can't wait to see it finished. That is fast progress. Where are you located?

That is amazing! We gunited on Good Friday a couple years ago - but we did our dig in the begining of February and got pebblesheen on June 30...I am deeply envious of how quickly your project is going - and it looks fantastic!!

Pool looks great! Will enjoy watching the progess. Have a question though. Your heat pump is 400K BTU's? The heat pumps the pool companies have proposed to me (AquaCal or ThermalFlo) are only 127K BTU's. Why the big discrepancy? I live in N. Florida if that makes a difference. Thanks in advance for the explanation. I'm learning a lot about pool construction reading this board.

kgolby,
his heater is natural gas, not a heat pump.

jmas65 -

thanks for the clarification!!

Posted by nikkineel "Wow! Beautiful design. I love the way the spa spills onto the sunshelf. I can't wait to see it finished. That is fast progress. Where are you located?"

Thanks for all of your kind comments. We are located in Cypress, Texas. David Perry will only build pools in the northwest Harris County area because he manages the construction closely. He will typically come by at least once on days that crews are working. He told us that he builds a pool in three weeks "as long as everything goes right". He will let you come to his office and pull files of references at random. All of them I spoke to told me he built their pool in a 3-4 week period. He's a higher end builder and a bit more expensive than some, but we feel it was worth it.

The flagstone crew actually did show up today and installed the coping. But I was too pooped from digging post holes for the equipment screens, so I didn't get photos. I'll take some in the morning and post them.

The deck crew is scheduled to do our deck on Monday. If all goes well they will install the WetEdge on Thursday and we will be filling on Friday.

Here are a couple of photos of the coping that was installed yesterday.....

Here's the cat looking for fish in the new "pond":

We visited three pools that our PB did today to look at WetEdge colors. The pools (and houses) were gorgeous!! The photos on WetEdge's website really don't do it justice. As a result, we changed our mind on the color. The Costa Tropical is just to gray and will not blend well with our buckskin stone and bronze tile. So we're going with Costa Azul instead. It's a very vibrant blue that just hits you in the face. I can't wait!!

16-17 days to from start to finish? Amazing considering gunite has a 28 day cure time!

True enough. No concrete reaches its maximum compressive strength for 28 days. However, it reaches about 70% in 7 days, which is strong enough for gunite applied on top of undisturbed soil.

Very nice pool! Hopefully the rain will hold off long enough for them to get it all done, we had a bunch of rain delays on ours this year.

Quote: "Amazing considering gunite has a 28 day cure time!"

As Ron said, the 28 day mark is for the concrete to achieve it's maximum design compressive strength, but that doesn't mean the pool can't be completed before then. It's pretty typical to wait a minimum of 7 days before plaster and fill. It can be longer than 7 days, but doesn't have to be. It's a little-known fact that concrete never does stop curing, even years later. As long as moisture is present it continues to cure, just at a greatly reduced rate. We've had commercial projects where the 7 day break came in light and we dammed up the perimeter and flooded the slab to increase curing. You don't see huge results doing that, but sometimes it's enough to get it up to its required 28 day strength.

Well, we're still on schedule, "green" concrete and all . The poured the deck today. Flagstone inlay is tomorrow. Uno will come out Weds. and clean up the shell, then apply the WetEdge Thursday, and acid wash/fill on Friday.

According to our WeatherGuessers, no rain is predicted until Friday. BRING IT ON!! It may reduce the impact on my water bill.

Here are boring photos of what was done today..

Hope I'm keeping y'all entertained!!

Ron

I love your pool design .. very nice!

Nice size on the sunshelf. We are in the final stages of design and was wondering if you could pls tell me the dimensions. thx

Thanks!! The sunshelf is 82" wide at the edge adjacent to the main pool and 84" deep.

Here are a couple of photos of the flagstone inlay they did today. We're still on schedule for fill on Friday.

Here are a couple of photos of the plaster. I mentioned before that we changed our mind from WetEdge Costa Tropical to Costa Azul. The pool we looked at had a beautiful turquoise colored water. This looks more like robin's egg blue without water in it. I can't wait to see it with water.

The plaster crew is coming back today to acid wash, install the SAm and SAl lights, drain covers, and return nozzles. They'll start the fill afterwards. By my rough calculations, we're looking at 16 hours to fill with 3 hoses (I have nice neighbors who also like to swim!!). Darrin will come over and start the equipment this weekend.

So it took our PB 17 days from start to finish and all of the work is very high quality. We're very pleased.

I don't plan on doing much in the way of landscaping right away as I have too many other projects to attend to (house painting and front yard landscaping) right now. Instead I will focus on getting the fences back up and the sod replaced. Besides, all the plants go on sale for 75% off in the fall!! In the meantime, I'll be learning alot about landscaping....and pool maintenance.

And of course, I'll post up more photos when we have (clear) water!!

I can't wait to see the spa spillover when it's running!

smbnoboles said: "I can't wait to see the spa spillover when it's running!"

Wait no more, my friend!!

Here's one with my daughter in the "cold tub"!

Here are a couple photos of the SAm and SAl lights at night:

They started it up yesterday and we've been brushing the WetEdge twice a day. I woke up this morning to find the filter pressure already 10 psi over backwash pressure. So I learned how to backwash today. Took like 5 minutes. All that plaster dust really gunked up the filter. It seems to be holding at a lower pressure today.

Well, that's all folks. 18 days from dig to turn on. And all workmanship is of high quality. The stone sub is coming back tomorrow to add more stone to the rock beam, because the builder wasn't satisfied with the look. Other than that, we're good to go.

I got in for about 30 minutes yesterday. It's still pretty chilly, but it gave me a good chance to put on some goggles to do an underwater inspection. Everything looks good.

Now comes Pool School and learning how properly maintain it.

That's a really cool twist on the spillover. It looks great on!

I don't think you're going to have to wait too long for warmer water. It's been so hot here the past few days!

We got a call from our PB yesterday morning, wanting to know if they could put us on the schedule to dig, and I had to say no, since we haven't closed on our loan yet. That really hurt. :-(

I'm glad you like the spa spillway. We like it too. Our PB does most of his that way. It's seems to be one of his design signatures.

The temperature got up in the mid 80's over the weekend, which is the only reason we were able to get in the water!! The water temperature is 78, which is probably about the bare minimum temperature I can tolerate!! I figure we'll start hitting the low 90's in about 2 weeks, so the water temp should soon follow.

Our loan process took about 2 weeks from application to closing. The loan was funded on a Tuesday (3 business days after closing by law) and the PB dug on Wednesday. I hope yours goes as smoothly as ours.

The 2-1/2 weeks it took to build the pool seemed agonizingly slow. Yet I realize that this is UNUSUALLY fast! I can't imagine having one drag on for 2-3 months or longer. But I know (from reading this forum) that it happens. As I have said before on this forum, for those of you who live in NW Harris County/Cypress, TX, I highly recommend our PB.

We turned in all of our paperwork and got approval on Wednesday. I'm still waiting to hear from the appraiser. I thought I'd get a call at least by Friday, but nope.

I just looked at the forecast and it shows 87 for tomorrow!

My kids swam here yesterday (Forney, near Dallas) but our water was a lot colder than yours- 68! I just stuck my feet in; that was enough for me! We did a big baja shelf like you, it's really nice for those days when it's too cold to get all the way in the pool.

Congrats on startup, it's amazing how fast they got yours in!

WOW! I am amazed at how fine your pool turned out! if you don't mind, how much did such a pool cost? We are just getting started with getting pool bids and this will be our first pool so we are very concerned with using the right PB who will not only give us a quality pool, but will not take advantage of us too!

Thanks
Yvonne

Firttimepool, we started out with a budget of $35k not knowing what we were getting into. This was based largely on what several friends and neighbors spent on their pools in the past 3-4 years. Unfortunately, materials prices have skyrocketed since then. We got proposals from 3 builders, who tried to stick as close to our budget as possible, yet give us most of the features we asked for. The proposals came in at $39k, $41k, and $44k. We ended up going with the highest bidder because of his long-standing spotless reputation in the area. Also, the other two were bidding lower-end equipment to stay close to our price point.

In the end our contract amount was $48,300 due to the addition of a Jandy Aqualink control system and WetEdge Satin Matrix pebble finish. All the equipment is either Pentair or Jandy (Aqualink and valves). We are please with the outcome and wouldn't have done it any other way. We decided that we would rather pay a little more knowing it would be done right.

Hope this helps.

I concur with the OP!

We were going to build our pool back in 2006 and had Atlantis come out to give us a bid. At the time, we were going to pretty much build the same pool, but install a spa as well.

When we had them come back out last month, the price had gone up $6k and that was without the spa! I was totally floored at how high the prices have gotten.

We ended up just over $37k. While the pool is small, we're going all out with it. If we had knocked off the heater, the PebbleTech, the stacked stone wall, and the flagstone, I think we could have built our pool for under $30k.

And my poor husband, bless his heart - he wanted to stay at around $27k. Not only did the pool go over by $10k, I talked him into having a pergola built too.

He grumbled about it for awhile, but now he's as excited as I am.

What color Satin Matrix is your pool? Looks beautiful!