Hi, everybody! Well it's been awhile, but I finally found some time to sit down and post progress pics of our pool.
Tuesday 6/2/15: Excavation Day 1:
By the end of the day this was as far as they'd gotten with the dig because they had to bobcat each bucket of dirt 250 feet down our driveway to another level area of our yard:
Wednesday 6/3/15: Excavation Day 2: Having realized it was going to take forever to dig the pool AND move the dirt out they brought in another bobcat!
By the end of day 2 our pile of dirt had grown to a humongous hill! The pile was so big I could only get 1/6th of it in the picture. It's amazing how huge 250 yards of dirt is!
Finished excavation:
Thursday 6/4/15: Steel Day: The steel guys worked like machines, arriving at 6:30am and leaving at 2:30pm. The only extra work we had them do was add heavier rebar to the bond beam (#4 vs #3) and cut out for an additional pool light. On the surface their work looked great and, since these guys were recommended by a couple of people, I trusted that it was all good.
Big mistake. Since I didn't go in the pool to check their work (I know, stupid right?!
) I didn't realize the steel placement wasn't 3" from the dirt (i.e. it wasn't to code). (More about the steel issues later.)
You can see where we had them move the light niches to add an additional light:
Monday 6/8/15: Plumbing started. No real pictures for this time period because we ended up ditching the plumber (even though he came recommended to us.) His work was really, really bad. No real $ loss though because we only paid him $500 and he dug all the trenches (plumbing/electrical). The only thing we lost was a little bit in materials for the crappy work he started (and the cost of broken door/windows from when our house was broken into when we went on vacation, which coincidentally only he and his subs, and my sister, knew we were going to be gone and our neighbor saw a truck that looked just like the subs race past her house right after our alarm went off).
On Friday 6/26/15 plumbing resumed with a new, MUCH better crew and continued through Saturday 6/27/15, along with electrical:
Pipes in the trenches: FYI, I wish the pipes in the trenches weren't piled on top of each other, but these guys used the first plumber's trenches, which were deep enough but not really wide enough. I guess they didn't feel like widening them since our soil is "decomposed" granite. I didn't really protest because I was just happy we were moving forward.
By the end of the day we were ready for our first inspection (or so we thought)...
Wednesday 7/1/15: First inspection: Failed...sort of. The inspector was going to fail us because the rebar wasn't 3" from the dirt. He thought the plumbing and electrical looked great, but the rebar...no way. I knew the code was 3", but had been so distracted by the bad first plumbers and the break-in in addition to a million other things that were going on that I forgot to check the spacing before inspection (and before we paid them
). The inspector went ahead and passed us since he knew that we were definitely going to fix the problem. (We didn't want our steel to rust from the ground up!).
But now the ENTIRE pool (including the new light niches we paid the steel guys to excavate) needed to be dug out. We had many areas that were 1/2" from the dirt. We did contact the steel guys/excavators about the problem, but of course the steel guys blamed the excavators and the excavators blamed the steel guys, which meant I got stuck fixing it. :grrrr: Ironically, we hired the excavators because the steel guys recommended them. Too bad the steel guys didn't tell me when I asked them BEFORE they started working on the steel that the excavation had problems.
Wednesday 7/15/15: Finally ready for shotcrete! We had a 2 week delay from inspection to shotcrete due to me having to excavate the entire pool by hand to get the 3" clearance and also wait for the shotcrete crew to become available. (Sorry no pictures of me with a digger bar, chisel or lugging at least 50 five gallon buckets full of dirt out of the pool or of the many MANY blisters all over my hands.
)
The morning of shotcrete started out nice and cool (and initially foggy until 11am or so), but by the time they finished at 3pm it was in the upper 80's. Luckily we actually got some rain over the weekend so I didn't have to water the pool for 2 days and the high humidity has helped a lot.
And that's the progress so far! The plumber/electrician subs are coming back on Saturday and we still have to hire a mason to do the coping/pavers but at least we have something that resembles a pool! I've been shopping for coping and tile and have yet to decide on that eye candy. :tongue:
I will say, despite some of the problems we've encountered along the way, I do like going the OB route. It's not for everyone, but since we got royally ripped-off from the general contractor who built our house I much prefer the control that comes from being an OB especially since I can schedule the subs according to my schedule. It takes a lot of the stress out of the process.