2 years of planning and it’s finally DONE in Tampa!

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That patio looks awesome!!!

Glad they followed your lead with the water line tile!

Glass tile-YES you can get different colors of mortar. What you can do is go to Lowes or such and get some paint cards-white, off white, light gray, medium gray......bring them home so you can lay your tile on them by your pool. Stand back and see which one you like the best. Then find the mortar that is that color! The skills of the tile setter will be very important with your tile. The trowel marks can show through if they are not skilled. I would try to be home when they do this work and look over their shoulder so they know you will be checking out their work. Having some yummies and drinks for them will go a long way as well!!

grout for glass tile-they have grout sticks for the different colors. Again bring them home and play around with them.

Kim:kim:
 
Pool coping was set today, waterline tile in the pool was grouted, and glass tile was added to the spa. Unfortunately, even going with a 10" beam in the spa, the walls needed almost half an inch of concrete to level both the inside and outside of it, so the 12x24 double bullnose we ordered was not wide enough. I had to go re-order 17 pieces of double bullnose to 15x24 today and 2 pieces that are triple bullnose that go on each side of the spillway. Cost us $791 to realize that we should have waited to order the spa coping. Oh well. I have the 25 other pieces for sale on craigslist, so hopefully i can recoup some of the money. Tile guy will come back in about 2 weeks when the new coping is finished and then set the spa coping and do all the step and bench marker tile on the same day.

The grout for the glass tile will be a light gray. We will remove the film on Wednesday and then go and scrape the excess thinset out of the joints with a razor knife. He said that the grout tools will wreck the tile and to just carefully use a razorblade. He also said that if we went with a white grout, it would not be as imperative to clean the joints out. The tile guy and his helper did a great job, but i had to go back around to the corners where half pieces were individually set to make sure that they were all evenly spaced and straight.

Plumber is scheduled for Wednesday and electrician on Thursday. Screen footer/retaining wall starts monday. We should have our next round of inspections completed next Friday, and decking should be installed the following week. Hard to believe we had the old pool removed on January 9th, and 19 days later, we are where we are.

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The pool plumbing and electrical conduit was installed this week. The plumbing was beautiful. The only hiccup i noticed was i originally wanted 2.5" pipe from each suction line to the pump, but i didnt catch that he used reducers at the back of the pool and spa and ran 2" to the pump. I did not catch it until the trenches were being dug in, and he assured me that my Intelliflo pump will have no problem powering everything, as its only 2 bubblers, 2 deck jets, and the pool and spa returns.

Apparently most pools around here have a pool light and a spa light. We needed just over 500 feet of electrical conduit for all of the lights. Aye aye aye. The electrician said that we will be able to land a 747 in our back yard when its all lit up.

We started scraping some of the thinset out of the joints in the glass tile. Tedious but doable, we just have to set aside an afternoon to get it all out. We also relocated the reclaimed water feed line, filled in those trenches, and cleaned up the site around the pool and picked up all of the chunks of rock and trash.

Footer/retaining wall will be started Monday, second inspection will be on Wednesday for all of the bonding, plumbing, termite inspection (ridiculous that you need a termite treatment sprayed onto concrete) and the footer.

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Dealine, main drain line, and one of the deck jets.
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And unfortunately, i had to add a $465 accessory to the project as well. Apparently i banged my apple watch on SOMETHING at some point in the morning and when i went to check the time.... well..... all i could do is hang my head and try and think back what i could have possibly hit it on. Anyway, it was a series 3 watch but Apple wanted over $200 to repair the screen, so i just sprung for the new series 4. Definitely not in the budget. But now i have Applecare and a protective case on it so i dont have a dumb dumb moment again.

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Tommy, your pool is beautiful! I love it!

Something similar happened with my husband’s watch, but he didn’t bang it on anything. He woke up one morning and the lid just literally popped off without any warning. I took it to Apple who told it was a known issue with the batteries swelling and breaking the seal. They replaced it for free, but with a refurbished model that had about 6 hours battery life unfortunately, so we still ended up buying a new one.
 
My work partner said the same thing happened to his wife. I may take it in and see, but the battery looks completely in tact to me so who knows.

And thank you for the compliment! We wanted to do the same thing with the spa that you did and take the glass all the way down to the waterline, but the tile guy begged us not to and we listened. I think i would have liked it better if we did all glass as opposed to running the 6x6 around the spa. Thank you so much for the inspiration!
 
Same thing - I think they overheat and expand but don’t necessarily break. Usually if you hit it on something, the glass would smash. You would have to hit it in such a strange way to break the whole lid off in one piece like that.

I like your tile, I think that once the water is in, you’ll be happy with it.
 
OK TroubleFree fam, ran into an issue. Not really an issue and i think we will fix it without an issue... but it relates to deck sloping and the footer.

Currently, our patio is sloped at 1/4" per foot, which equates to a pretty fair drop off on the deep end side of the pool. The beam of the pool is set to the highest point of the patio, which we have been told is 100% correct. When we set the form boards for the footer and run a level from the top of the coping to the form board, we are currently at 5 inches of drop over a 3 foot span. Taking into account the thickness of the travertine, we have a very very steep drop off on walkway from deep end of the pool to the end of the deck.

I do not have pictures today, but will get some more on Friday. It sounds like the solution is to raise the form boards up about 2 and a half inches (i think 2.5 but i cannot remember exactly what the guys said) or add a smaller piece of wood to add height, as well as cheat the slope toward the southeast side of the pool. From talking with all of our subs, a pool deck and footer is a different animal as opposed to a footer for a house per se. They all agreed it is absolutely no big deal at all and is frequently encountered, it is just finding a way to lessen the slope in one area and make up for it in a different area where it will be less noticeable.

We ended up cancelling the termite treatment and inspection for tomorrow. At the advice of the concrete guy, he said pump the brakes and slow things down to get this right and then proceed. My goal was water in the pool by end of March, the rate we are going now we would be about a month ahead of schedule, so no harm no foul.
 

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Sorry it took so long. We found a solution, after speaking with another decking contractor, which was to raise the existing footer height 2.25" by adding/stacking a 2x2 and a 1x2 on top of the form boards which makes the slope a 1/4" per foot, which is perfect. We will just need to taper the last 8 or so feet to pitch the deck toward the drain in the corner. Work resumes tomorrow with the footer with the steel.

The second opinion deck guy re- did all of his measurements to verify the existing form boards and we realized that art of the actual house is out about 6". We spent about an hour trying to decide whether to move any boards or not but we decided to keep it as is, as the difference will not be very noticeable once everything is said and done. Its just wonderful knowing that when the house was built, all of the masons and slab crew used framing squares to make sure all of the corners were 90 degrees. :rolleyes:

We also realized that we were missing part of the footer for the screen enclosure which will be added tomorrow, no big deal there.

Anyway, here are a few pics of the footer with a level showing what the new slope will be.

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This was a busy week, coping and all tile work was finished, footer and equipment pad was poured and another round of inspections were completed.

Decking is going to be started on February 25.

As we were finishing up today, we realized we had a small "oops" and forgot to put a 3x3 concrete pad on where the screen door will go over by the equipment pad. The concrete man will be back here to strip the forms on Monday and we may just pay him to add the pad so that im not stuck edging around a rough and uneven level of thinset holding the pavers in for the pad. I would rather have the pavers on the pad just thinset down to it. Cleaner lines around it.

We met with one pool finish company this morning, and we are trying to get ahold of one other. We are dead set on Stonescapes mini pebbles, largely because Pebbletec only has one installer in the area and they do not get good reviews, nor does the other NPT/Wet Edge company.

Our color choices are Aqua White and Aqua Blue. I wanted the pool to basically be all abalone, but i was informed that NPT is trying to phase out the abalone shells in their formulas due to the breakdown of the shell staining the plaster, so looks like we will be looking into the glass instead... queue the pictures.

There are several types of glass that were discussed including touch of glass which involves sky blue glass beads, which are lighter in color but shimmer in the sun, and cobalt blue glass which has less shimmer, but a very rich color. Both of these can be added and mixed together in 1, 2, or 3 bag batches, but unfortunately most of the glass is mixed with the batch and only some of it is hand-casted after. Price per 50lb bag of glass is about $150, so anywhere to an additional $150 to $450 per batch. Assuming the pool may take upwards of 4 batches (rough estimate in my pea brain), it would be about an 1800 upgrade charge, which would be well worth it.

The pool finisher recommended Aqua Blue because he likes the black and gold pebble in the mix which makes the color more vibrant. We have been looking at pictures for months and cannot decide. Do we do aqua white with the cobalt glass rather than the sky blue glass in hopes of slightly darkening the aqua white, or do we do aqua blue with any variation of glass and hope that its not too dark. The pool gets a good amount of sunlight but there will be a bronze screen enclosure around it which will cut down on some of the natural light.

We were also told that the puerto rico blend could work too since it contains several colors of smaller glass beads. Its a Crud shoot. Ugh

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Now for the finish and glass samples. Each bowl has either all sky blue, all cobalt blue, or a mix of both. The sky blue has much more shimmer to it, which is what im looking for, yet the wife likes the dark blue. Mixing the two may be our best bet to satisfy both tastes.

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Good catch and call on the 3x3 add on. That will be the finishing piece there for sure. Save some work later on and make it look finished.

-glass beads= OH SO PRETTY! I say use both colors. Do this for me. Use a mixture of 2 to1. 2 light to 1 dark. Put this in a bowl and lets see how that looks.

I also have a link for you to read up on. It is a lot of info but it will make your plaster job last for a very long time if followed: Ten Guidelines for Quality Pool Plaster

Kim:kim:
 
That thread is gold!!! We will split up the colors tomorrow afternoon and take a peek. I don’t believe the dark blue glass will make the finish darker, so I’m leaning toward aqua blue with the glass. I’m just curious if when they add the glass beads to the mix if they end up taking other bags of pebbles out of the mix or if the glass is added on top of everything else.

How do you think the finish companies would react if I said I only want X amount of bags of glass and I only want them to be hand cast toward the end? I see that as not being well received because it can cut into their profit.
 
Tommy a cooler full of cold drinks, table full of yummy food with goodies thrown in the mix like cookies and brownies will go a LONG way to making them happy to do as you want. I am also going to call in @bdavis466 to see what his thoughts are on your question.

Kim:kim:
 
Thats a good idea. We take care of all of the subs anyway, we open the pool bath for them and show them the drink fridge in the garage that they can help themselves to. I went to publix and ordered the shotcrete crew subs from the deli and brought it back for them. Just seems like the right thing to do when they are working like dogs. Thank you in advance! Especially the plaster thread!
 
Got the quote for the safety fence today. $1350. We budgeted $2000 and thought we would have to completely encircle the pool, but he has it laid out where the fence only separates the entry points from the house since the doors for the screen enclosure have handles high enough to meet code. So that was a nice little blessing.

Add in the $500 that will be spent on cleaning the tile roof before the deck goes down (and my HOA doesn’t pitch a fit), and thankfully only a measly $25 to patch my wife’s car tire because of the giant screw in the middle of the tread, and coming in under budget was quite nice.

The footer and equipment pad came out to $6000 total, but it’s built way bigger than required.
 
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