Hi All - It's been a little bit since I posted this thread, but wanted to circle back and hopefully get some thoughts around my current thinking. Essentially, we gravitated towards the rectangle pool design. At first thought it was going to be simple/clean/easy and hopefully cheaper. After several rounds of designs/changes/etc we have a bigger, more elaborate, more feature rich pool than we started at a really hard to swallow price. The issue is its hard to go back to that ~38-40k price pool as its missing a lot of must-haves to us that we didnt realize until we really got into it. Things like pebbletech vs standard plaster, the size of the pool, enough concrete to make a good living and pool area, etc, etc. It seems like the only other lever we have to make costs go down is shrinking the pool. Anyhow, I wanted to get some opinions on the shape and size to ensure I'm not missing or overlooking anything. I'm close to 60k estimated on this pool and decking, which is way more than we started out thinking we'd spend AND we ditched the spa option along the way.
Some things we added:
L - shaped to allow for a sizable (12x8) baja shelf that doesnt interfere with the rest of the pool.
A seat that extends across the shallow end allowing for people to sit with the butts in the water and legs dangling without taking much room from the pool (aka: my pabst blue ribbon sippin ledge)
Changed from 3.5 to 5.5 to 3.5 sport pool to 4' to 7' traditional deep end
Went from around 90' perimeter to 122' because of the L and size of the pool.
After all said and done, I really like the L shaped design. It feels like it gives us the full rectangle pool for kids playing, swimming and swimming laps, yet it gives a connected "yet out of the way a bit" hangout place for the adults on the baja step without needing to hog up a huge part of the shallow end with baja step in the non-L shape rectangle. Also we went with 38' long to hopefully give enough room for laps, definitely not sure what is appropriate here. 34' would make things cheaper for sure, but I dont want to regret going to small and not being able to do any laps. The main pool is 15' wide. Fencing not showing or priced in this whole deal yet either. Anyhow, would love any thoughts or opinions to help me get my mind right around the whole thing.