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...
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.
