Hey all,
Any advice is appreciated on the below post. Pictures and documents included, as well as the story.
TL;DR - Pool company backed out because of soil conditions. Now others are building pools on our street. Is it wise to build the pool?
Back in April, I started posting about my pool design. We built a new home backing up to a greenbelt with a small back yard and were very excited about putting our pool in. We found a company we liked, worked out all the details, negotiated a great price, and signed the contract.
The day before excavation I get a call from the manager that they were concerned about the soil conditions. I remembered our home builder had provided us with a soil report so I sent it to the pool company and they said they were walking away unless we wanted to engineer the pool with pier and beams and void boxes to the tune of an extra $30K on top of the pool price.
We had already paid $2,500 to move our AC unit so they reimbursed us for that and so we decided to move on.
Fast forward to September/October and we noticed that 4 to 5 other homes are building pools on our street! One of them is just 4 doors down. I now feel that perhaps we negotiated a great price before they saw the construction effort involved and decided they were going to lose too much money on the project. I have attached our soil report along with the one that is down the street and my questions are:
1) What steps can we take with our evaluation process to make sure we are protected and the pool will be stable?
- For example, I have attached a document describing a new mat and drainage technique to keep soil moisture stable. Has anyone done that?
- If the pool company provides a lifetime warranty on the shell, can we make sure that covers tilting and sinking as well as cracking? (Former pool company said that tilting was their concern with our soil).
2) Should we even do this based on our soil report? Is the soil that bad? My friends are all pointing to the fact that everything east of I35 in Austin has terrible soil and yet there are hundreds of pools that no one complains about.
I have also attached the initial dimensions of the pool shown, but we are now willing to scale that down if necessary. Initially, I wanted a lap pool since the pool had to be so skinny.
From our soil report, " PVM Reduction - Point estimates of the PVM of the in-situ soil profile are greater than 4 ½ inches for the lots listed in Table 3 of this report. Remediation will be required on these lots to reduce the PVM to less than 4 ½ inches. Additional recommendations regarding PVR reduction are included in the Recommendations - PVM Reduction section of this report. "
Pictures and Documents below:
Any advice is appreciated on the below post. Pictures and documents included, as well as the story.
TL;DR - Pool company backed out because of soil conditions. Now others are building pools on our street. Is it wise to build the pool?
Back in April, I started posting about my pool design. We built a new home backing up to a greenbelt with a small back yard and were very excited about putting our pool in. We found a company we liked, worked out all the details, negotiated a great price, and signed the contract.
The day before excavation I get a call from the manager that they were concerned about the soil conditions. I remembered our home builder had provided us with a soil report so I sent it to the pool company and they said they were walking away unless we wanted to engineer the pool with pier and beams and void boxes to the tune of an extra $30K on top of the pool price.
We had already paid $2,500 to move our AC unit so they reimbursed us for that and so we decided to move on.
Fast forward to September/October and we noticed that 4 to 5 other homes are building pools on our street! One of them is just 4 doors down. I now feel that perhaps we negotiated a great price before they saw the construction effort involved and decided they were going to lose too much money on the project. I have attached our soil report along with the one that is down the street and my questions are:
1) What steps can we take with our evaluation process to make sure we are protected and the pool will be stable?
- For example, I have attached a document describing a new mat and drainage technique to keep soil moisture stable. Has anyone done that?
- If the pool company provides a lifetime warranty on the shell, can we make sure that covers tilting and sinking as well as cracking? (Former pool company said that tilting was their concern with our soil).
2) Should we even do this based on our soil report? Is the soil that bad? My friends are all pointing to the fact that everything east of I35 in Austin has terrible soil and yet there are hundreds of pools that no one complains about.
I have also attached the initial dimensions of the pool shown, but we are now willing to scale that down if necessary. Initially, I wanted a lap pool since the pool had to be so skinny.
From our soil report, " PVM Reduction - Point estimates of the PVM of the in-situ soil profile are greater than 4 ½ inches for the lots listed in Table 3 of this report. Remediation will be required on these lots to reduce the PVM to less than 4 ½ inches. Additional recommendations regarding PVR reduction are included in the Recommendations - PVM Reduction section of this report. "
Pictures and Documents below:
