My wife has always wanted a pool. She grew up on the local swim team and still loves the smell of chlorine to this day. The answer to 'when?' was always 'maybe someday'... well Baby - someday is TODAY!

There were two reasons that we invested in a cul-de-sac lot when we built our house 3 years ago.. one was so that our dogs would have a huge backyard to play in, and the other was so that we could someday have an awesome pool. Things came together this season for us, and we decided to head off down the road to pool-ownership. Now my wife is the planner in the family... if there's a spreadsheet involved, she's all over it. She's been reading blogs and forums, talking to friends and pool owners, and coming up with a list of local builders for months now. She narrowed down the list of candidates to 6, 5 of which responded to our request for bids. Eventually, we chose Pulliam Pools here in Katy, TX to handle everything for us. Their design and price perfectly matched our description of what we wanted, and their salesman Shawn Carter came highly recommended from friends who had dealt with him before. In a business you know nothing at all about, that sort of personal insight means the world when juggling a handful of deals in the air.

So we tweaked the plan a bit based on recommendations from knowledgeable friends, negotiated the price just a tad, and signed the contract last week. Shawn immediately sent the plans to our HOA for approval, and when I called them today 'just to check', they let me know that the approval letter was going in the mail today. WE WERE THRILLED!! A quick call to Pulliam and we're tentatively on the dig schedule for next week. Someone should be coming out in the next 48 hours to mark the utility lines in our yard, and again on Monday to lay out the pool for what we hope is a Tuesday dig. After a historic drought here in Texas, there's actually some weather moving in over the coming weekend that we hope doesn't delay the ground-breaking... wouldn't that be a downer!?

I'll undoubtedly be taking TONS of photos and boring you to tears with updates, but I really enjoyed it when others on this forum did the same. I've lived vicariously through y'all for weeks now. I even setup a PoolCam in our backyard to take a photo every 5 minutes for an eventual time-lapse video of the build after seeing lots of others on YouTube.

So stay tuned for more! It's gonna be a GREAT RIDE!

I'm looking forward to watching your progress!

Another Texas, Welcome and cant wait to see the build.

True to their word, Pulliam Pools had ULS come out this morning to mark all our utility lines in preparation for next week's dig... woo hoo!!

Sweet. Keep the pics coming.

Post, post, post! I love seeing and reading the progress. Your story reads a lot like ours. I (the wife) has always wanted a pool, was on swim team, love swimming and LOVE the smell of chlorine. I swear it gives me a "high". I have wanted 1 for 10 years and started looking 5 years ago. My husband has been pushing me to 'go for it" and finally this summer I researched like crazy and signed with a PB 2 weeks ago. I thiink our permits will be ready tomorrow and we should be digging NEXT WEEK!! I can hardly believe it and actually feel a bit sick about it. I hope all goes well. We are in Central MD so our swim season isn't as long as yours in TX but I plan on using the he double hockey sticks out of it.
I will post when there is something good to post.
Good luck!!

Who did you go with? I'm in North central MD.

where north central? i am in the westminster area/ carroll county. i went with catalina pools. we are putting in a 48 x 23 kinda like a lazy L concrete with a diving platform and a waterfall. i was hoping to have the permits by today so they can dig next week. how about you. where are you in the process and who are you using?

Pulliam Pools sent their construction supervisor out today to lay out the pool in the backyard for next week's dig. A couple of cans of orange paint and some wooden stakes later, and we can better visualize how it'll all turn out. Right now we're on the schedule for Tuesday, but they might improve that to Monday if another build continues to have setup problems. Now that would just make us SO unhappy... NOT!!!

Well wouldn't you KNOW it!! Even with our record setting drought this year, if I heard the weatherman correctly, it rained more yesterday than any single day since July/2010... so the PB let us know this morning that our dig is pushed off till Wednesday.

I can be patient!! I swear I can!! Grrrrr

Figures...

We are digging Thursday. I will be interested to see the progress of both pools going at the same time.
I am hoping they are done by Thanksgiving and can get it completed without having to wait until the spring to finish things up.
I have fencing guys here today putting up the fence around the perimeter of our yard instead of just around the pool. Didn't cost much more and our dogs will love the freedom. Good luck on Wednesday. I keep telling my husband that I just hope they don't "dig up any dead bodies" out there

Bad weather delayed our dig by one day, and then we found that we were the second dig of the day, so the excavators didn't show up till almost 2pm. With sunset at around 7pm right now, PB tells us that they may have to come back tomorrow morning, which will set back the plumbing/rebar folks by a bit.

Also, the pool equipment showed up today as well and is sitting in the backyard... now I can worry about thievery until it's hooked up... egads!

NOTE: PB left around 5pm with excavators still working... When neighbors complained about noise at 9pm I finally had to send workmen home myself

gotta love those neighbors! Mine complained that a) they were starting work too early in the mornings, and b) "why is this taking so long?" LOL

Yours is looking good!

7am sharp, the rebar dudes showed up. An hour later the cleanup crew showed up to power-spray the driveway and culdesac where the excavators left a mess last night. Expecting plumbers later today... will update pix all along as things progress...

Looks like they are moving right along. My dig started at 8am this morning. They cut out for the retaining wall and leveled the yard. Now they are laying out the pool and are going to dig that out soon, I hope. Drizzling here in MD but they are continuing to work. Fencing guys also finishing up a fence, so as you can imagine it is busy and messy and rainy here at our house. I have to get up my own thread and pics of our project soon.

Picked out our tile today for next week's install. We didn't want something that would simply disappear against the flagstone coping and walls, so we chose something with blues and tans in it to pull together the blues and greys of our plaster with the earth tones of the Wister Flagstone. They'll also throw in the matching decorative tiles every now and then for good measure. We went with Master Tile Stardust Siena, which we've seen others use here on TFP to good reviews.

This was by far the toughest decision we've made so far... colors!!

I love that tile. Just dog eared that page myself!
Nice choice.

Here's a silly thing that I did that some of you do-it-yourself'ers might find humorous. I did a search on YouTube for 'pool timelapse' and found tons of folks who had made really nice timelapse videos of their pool build. Not wanting to spend much money to reproduce their results, my friend Google and I made a plan and came up with our poor-man's version.

First, I dug up an old laptop PC and a webcam that wasn't in use. I installed the free Yawcam software to take a photo every 5 minutes between 7am and 8pm and save the original locally and then FTP a smaller version to the internet. That way, I have a nice copy for my eventual video, plus I can simply check on what's going on at home by looking at the photo directory on my website. Yawcam is simply awesome!

For my eventual video, I installed the free Windows Live Movie Maker from Microsoft. You just drag and drop your photos onto its desktop, tell it how long to display each photo and voila - timelapse.

Finally, since I wanted to have the webcam outside (and it was NOT weather resistant), I ran to WalMart and grabbed a weatherproof flashlight for $8 and a 16 foot USB extension cable for about the same. Take all the guts out of the flashlight, drill a hole in the rear for the USB cable to exit, and wrap the webcam in an old tshirt to wedge it in place inside the flashlight. I bought a flashlight with a stand on it, then screwed the stand to a piece of wood I had laying around, and cable-tied it all to the top of our deck. I had to monkey with the camera direction a few times to get it centered on the pool, and then again when I realized that the camera pointed almost due East and got a lot of sun flare in the early mornings. Rain tended to streak the glass, so I rubber banded a DVD cover onboard to act as a roof. Eventually got everything like I wanted it and simply walked away from the setup. I check things every day to make sure it's all working correctly, and copy all the higher-quality photos to a backup drive for safekeeping.

All in all, a pretty neat little setup.



And here's a sample video I made of the first few days... enjoy! Hopefully at the end of this trip, you'll get to see the whole enchilada...

Howdy neighbor - most enjoyable build - great fun with the webcam, nice!
Hope the install finishes smoothly and you can get a few good weeks in the pool before the cold weather sets in - it is AWESOME right now!