DIY Inground Liner Pool - Pictures

[DIYLinerPool]

Hi All - recently joined this forum and already have learned a ton, has made things a lot easier for me! Thought I would share some pictures of my project I completed last month. Last year my neighbor who had construction/excavating experience convinced me we could buy a kit online and build our own inground pool. Seemed pretty far fetched at first but after doing some research it seemed like something we could maybe do. Ended up buying a 32 x 16 rectangle kit with auto cover from royal swimming pools, ordered last July and was hoping for a 2020 install but due to the supply chain issues did not receive till end of October, it sat in my garage all winter (glad this happened though as the same kit is like 30-40% more expensive now). No complaints about royal swimming pools, everything shipped with no missing parts, their tech support guy was great (called him with a ton of questions).

We started Easter weekend with the dig and completed a week before memorial day, we took a couple days off work but mostly night and weekend work. I attached some pictures, let me know what you think and if anyone is thinking of doing the same feel free to ask questions! A few things I learned from this project if I were to do another one:

1. It wasn't worth saving black dirt at the beginning to use for grading - maybe if you have a huge yard, but it ended up getting too much in the way and caused us to not be able to use a machine on one side of the pool, all wheel barrow work. Dirt is cheap enough.
2. The day we did the concrete footer was the worst, only had 3 guys, wish I had at least double that. You have a time limit with the concrete truck (45 minutes I had), it took us like 2 hours. Got charged $3 per minute after 45 minutes.
3. The full width liner over steel steps were for sure worth it, get a ton of complements.
4. The auto cover is great, the instructions were terrible, even their youtube videos werent super clear. They had a good tech support guy though.
5. Love the wedge depth (goes from like 3 feet gradually to 5.5 feet).
6. Deck jets were a last minute addition, I like them more than I thought plus they are nice for aerating when you need to raise PH but not TA.
7. The pool krete day wasnt as bad as I thought it would be.
8. 2" Schedule 40 PVC sticks were like $7.50 a stick when we started and got up to 14 per stick by the end, material pricing is crazy right now as everyone knows.

Thats all I can think about for now, let me know if anyone has any questions!

 

[Texas Splash]

Very nice!

 

[Sean ATX]

Looks great! I'd love to hear more about the dig. Did you and your neighbor do that yourself? Is that something a mere mortal can do with patience? Did you end up hauling the dirt away?

Also, did you do the pool bottom yourself?

Where I live there seems to be no inground liner pools (and all contractors are super busy anyhow - that's what you get for living in one of America's fastest growing cities) so I'm concerned I don't have many professionals to lean on for those parts of the job.

 

[Rockybalboa]

This is awesome! Would love to see a total of amount of time and money spent for this build. Looks like a professional did it!

 

[drsipe]

It took me a few minutes to realize that picture 1061 was a built in retractable cover,,,,, very cool.

Love the install pictures.

 

[wireform]

All in all what were the involved costs. Can you sort of break it down, would love to see the numbers. Thanks in advance.

 

[DIYLinerPool]

Looks great! I'd love to hear more about the dig. Did you and your neighbor do that yourself? Is that something a mere mortal can do with patience? Did you end up hauling the dirt away?

Also, did you do the pool bottom yourself?

Where I live there seems to be no inground liner pools (and all contractors are super busy anyhow - that's what you get for living in one of America's fastest growing cities) so I'm concerned I don't have many professionals to lean on for those parts of the job.

Thank you! Yes, my neighbor gets all the credit for the dig. He used to work in underground utilities so had a lot of experience operating excavators and skid steers. We dug over easter weekend. Took one day to dig the "shelf" then the next day we dug the wedge bottom down to 6 feet. If I had a bigger yard it probably could have been done in one day but we had to take all the dirt to the front of the house with the skid steer. Would have been a lot easier if I could of had the semi back into my backyard. Hired a semi driver to haul away, 13 semi truck loads. Luckily I had someone who took the dirt for free to build a berm for shooting. I would say if you dont have any experience with an excavator it would be worth hiring out. I got a couple quotes for comparison from some excavators, wasnt cheap! Also with the liner pool you have those slopes on the sides which take time, we did a lot of hand digging for that.

We did do the pool bottom ourselves, ordered a pallet of pool krete through royal swimming pools. Rented a mortar mixer (worth every penny). It took about 6 or 7 hours. The next day I tried to do as good of a job as possibly shaving down all the rough edges and making everything look good, unfortunately when its dark out and my pool light is on I can see a lot of imperfections on the bottom of the pool. Just like areas that are indented a bit. Not sure how I would get that better if I did it again, I've seen other people on here complaining about the same thing when they hired pros. There were a couple days of significant rain forecasted when we did the floor so we were in a bit of a rush. It looks great though during the daylight!

 

[DIYLinerPool]

This is awesome! Would love to see a total of amount of time and money spent for this build. Looks like a professional did it!

Thank you! We started easter weekend (friday april 2) and were done around May 17. We primarily worked weekends and nights as we both have day jobs but we did take about 4 vacation days. I would say it would have been a 2-2.5 week job if we worked all day every day, but definitely would have gotten burnt out quick!

I spent about 43K total on this. Keep in mind a significant chunk of this was for the automatic pool cover, id say about 10K of it. Also this includes 2K for having to move my electrical line and about 4K for landscaping (semi of dirt, 1200 sq ft of sod, pavers and landscaper cost to extend my bluestone patio). If you take those out its about 37K, that would be a more apples to apples comparison to what a pool contractor would quote as they would typically put it on the homeowner to get the electric moved and landscaping would all be extra. A few pool builders in my area end of 2020 were quoting mid 80s to low 90s for a 16x32 foot liner pool with auto cover which 4 feet of concrete patio included all around. So it was a solid 55-60% savings.

Also I was lucky to have purchased back in July 2020. It sat in my garage all winter but was worth it as I went on royal swimming pools and picked out the exact same pool and it went up by about 6 grand. I also bought all my materials in march when I knew prices were going up. By the end of the project when I had to buy a few extra sticks of PVC they doubled in price. We moved the electric last fall and also stubbed the gas line out of my house last fall, materials were cheaper back then. Also had a friend who had the excavating experience and a free place to dump the dirt. If I were to have paid an excavator and paid for dumping the dirt that would have added like 6 grand at least to my excavating costs.

Let me know if you wanted any more specific cost details. I am an accountant by trade so I keep pretty good records of all the numbers!

 

[DIYLinerPool]

All in all what were the involved costs. Can you sort of break it down, would love to see the numbers. Thanks in advance.

Heres an overall breakdown of the cost:

Pool Kit (steel walls and hardware, auto cover, heater, filter pump, light, skimmers and main drains, pool krete) - about 23K
Electrician Cost - 2500 (installed sub panel, ran electric to equipment on pad, light, auto cover, did bonding)
Electrical Move - 2100 (we dug trench and laid down the pipe, city came and pulled new wire, electrician installed new meter box)
Gas Line - 200 (we did ourselves)
Excavating costs - 3500
Landscaping - 4000 (soil, sod, some trees, some extra bluestone and install, dingo rental)
Permit fee - 300
Concrete Deck - 4300 ( we subbed this out)
Concrete Footer - 1400
Gravel for backfill - 1300
PVC/Misc - 1000

We knew someone who owned a landscaping business and let us borrow his skid steer for a couple weeks, so that was a nice savings. We rented one for the dig weekend though.

Only things we subbed out were electrician work, concrete deck, and I hired my landscaper to put back my bluestone patio together and extend it, we had to pull a decent amount of stones up as the pool final grade was like 3" higher than the paver patio.

 

[DIYLinerPool]

It took me a few minutes to realize that picture 1061 was a built in retractable cover,,,,, very cool.

Love the install pictures.

Thank you!

 

[wireform]

Heres an overall breakdown of the cost:

Pool Kit (steel walls and hardware, auto cover, heater, filter pump, light, skimmers and main drains, pool krete) - about 23K
Electrician Cost - 2500 (installed sub panel, ran electric to equipment on pad, light, auto cover, did bonding)
Electrical Move - 2100 (we dug trench and laid down the pipe, city came and pulled new wire, electrician installed new meter box)
Gas Line - 200 (we did ourselves)
Excavating costs - 3500
Landscaping - 4000 (soil, sod, some trees, some extra bluestone and install, dingo rental)
Permit fee - 300
Concrete Deck - 4300 ( we subbed this out)
Concrete Footer - 1400
Gravel for backfill - 1300
PVC/Misc - 1000

We knew someone who owned a landscaping business and let us borrow his skid steer for a couple weeks, so that was a nice savings. We rented one for the dig weekend though.

Only things we subbed out were electrician work, concrete deck, and I hired my landscaper to put back my bluestone patio together and extend it, we had to pull a decent amount of stones up as the pool final grade was like 3" higher than the paver patio.

Amazing to say the least.

 

[Sean ATX]

Thanks for sharing, @DIYLinerPool. This is very useful. If you don't mind I have a couple more questions:

• What did you use the excavate? I'm wondering if you were tight for space and had to use a mini-excavator and, if so, if that experience was okay.
• You mentioned 13 trips with the dump truck. Is that roughly 130 cubic yards of dirt you had removed?
• I didn't know you could rent out a dump truck driver. What was the coordination like? Was he there the weekend of the dig ready to remove the dirt as you went or did he come by once you had a big mound to take away?

 

[DIYLinerPool]

Thanks for sharing, @DIYLinerPool. This is very useful. If you don't mind I have a couple more questions:

• What did you use the excavate? I'm wondering if you were tight for space and had to use a mini-excavator and, if so, if that experience was okay.
• You mentioned 13 trips with the dump truck. Is that roughly 130 cubic yards of dirt you had removed?
• I didn't know you could rent out a dump truck driver. What was the coordination like? Was he there the weekend of the dig ready to remove the dirt as you went or did he come by once you had a big mound to take away?

Sure no problem. We used a mini excavator. You can see it in one of my pictures from the original post. My backyard and side yard is tight so one guy was piling up the dirt with the mini excavator as he dug and the other was moving it to a pile on my driveway waiting for the dump truck to get back to load.
I’d say the cubic yards sounds about right? We were using a semi dump truck. I don’t think he was having us load it to full capacity.

we did the dig on the weekend so it was a side job for the dump truck driver. He came Saturday morning. We started Friday night and had one semi load ready on my driveway waiting to load Saturday morning. As he went to dump the dirt (it was at a location about 45 minutes round trip) we prepped another load or two on the driveway. Since the place we were dumping was far we were always ahead of him. We would have to stop to wait because we ran out of places to pile dirt.

that Saturday we had about 3 dump truck loads left which we had hauled off the following weekend. At the end of the project we had like a 3/4 load just of clay and stuff that accumulated during the project.

 

[Aquaman7]

Very impressive. How many guys in total to help you?

 

[DIYLinerPool]

Very impressive. How many guys in total to help you?

Thank you. It was me and my neighbor the whole time then depending on the job I would call in a few reinforcements, such as the day we did the concrete footer and the day we had to wheelbarrow 20 tons of stone to backfill the side that we couldn't get to with the skid steer.

 

[Aquaman7]

Congratulations on your DIY pool. A lot of work but now you can enjoy.

 

[duckcmmndr]

Job well done...it is a lot of work, but so rewarding when you are finished! I DIY'ed mine last year, I did hire a pro to do the pool bottom and I must say he did a fantastic job. I only have a few places under the lights at night that I can see some dips. They will be easy to fix those with a skim coat of Quikrete Hydraulic Cement whenever new liner time rolls around (praying for a long time).

 

[Sean ATX]

Job well done...it is a lot of work, but so rewarding when you are finished! I DIY'ed mine last year, I did hire a pro to do the pool bottom and I must say he did a fantastic job. I only have a few places under the lights at night that I can see some dips. They will be easy to fix those with a skim coat of Quikrete Hydraulic Cement whenever new liner time rolls around (praying for a long time).

Do you mind me asking what it costs to hire a pro for something like that?

 

[duckcmmndr]

Do you mind me asking what it costs to hire a pro for something like that?

I think that varies wildly from one location to the other. The guy I used normally installs pool (turnkey, start to finish). I caught him at the perfect time where he had a day he could do it. He brought 2 guys with him mixing and toting it to him. My pool is pretty big and he did the whole thing in about 6 or 7 hours and he was the only one with a trowel. I jumped in and did about 3x3 area...no thank you, too much like normal concrete work for me. Around here the going rate ranges from $10 to $15 per bag for the labor to mix and spread.

 

[DIYLinerPool]

Job well done...it is a lot of work, but so rewarding when you are finished! I DIY'ed mine last year, I did hire a pro to do the pool bottom and I must say he did a fantastic job. I only have a few places under the lights at night that I can see some dips. They will be easy to fix those with a skim coat of Quikrete Hydraulic Cement whenever new liner time rolls around (praying for a long time).

Thanks! Yeah that was smart. That at least makes me feel better though that even pros leave some “dips”. If we do another one it would be better , just like anything I guess. Luckily most of the swimming is done during the day and you can’t see any imperfections during the day!