I would urge that you put a spillway on the spa. This will allow freshly chlorinated water in. The Texas sun will otherwise burn off the chlorine, leaving the spa unsanitized and subject bio-baddies and algae.

Scott

Thanks for the advice! When I saw the pictures I was surprised not to see one as I was pretty sure earlier versions had a spillway.

Also the pump is a hayward tristar 2 speed pump

Check to see if you might save a couple hundred by changing the heater to a 350K BTU. We did and he heat up difference for the spa is less than 5 minutes difference. Also, I would highly recommend a robot cleaner over the 280. We have the Polaris 9300 and love it. But you might find it cheaper over the internet vs buying through your PB.

The design looks great, congrats! I do have a couple of comments, one is regarding the depth. Ours is the same 3.5-5-4 ratio and if I had it to do over again I'd bump the 3.5 down to 4. 3.5 is a good depth for small kids, but they don't stay small for long and it's a bit too shallow for adults to lounge in and also too shallow for a good turn while swimming. The other comment is about the Leuders. I'm an architect and we've done a lot of banks with Leuders cladding, it looks nice but it does flake. It doesn't damage the integrity of the stone, but it can be messy. We have a flagstone grotto on our pool and it constantly sheds sand and small flakes of stone in the areas that the cleaner can't reach (the grotto seat and the tanning shelf).

Good luck!

Some simple aesthetic comments....

I'd urge you to have the designer put some effort into a correct layout of deck and pool making all of the large deck steps equal sizes....you have a small one and two large ones as you step out of the gazebo area to the pool, and the gaps don't line up at the far end of the pool. This takes some thinking and planning ahead right on down to the size of the spacing desired between the deck gaps, but trust me!...it's worth being insanely picky about. If not for you, for the next person you sell your home to. Aim for all deck squares to be the exact same size with same spacing, THEN fit the pool,spa, and gazebo accordingly.

Lastly, I'd continue to wrap the exterior spa corner in tile, not showing thst change of material. I've seen it both ways hundreds of times, and changing material always cheapens the look in my opinion.

Im a straight line guy, so I like the simplistic approach to the design! Looks great!

I hope you did not go with the cheapest bid. This design execution needs to be done correctly with a lot of attention to detail or you will have all kinds of long term issues.
The rendering is sloppy and am not sure how all this is going to work. If your designer does not spend the effort up front what will he do once he has your $'s.

I assume these pavers are big blocks of leuders. I had to have mine all redone by another company. I live in Austin Texas. The guy I used was really good but pricey to fix my mess the pool builder left behind.

good points with the rendering. The rendering was what we worked with him to give us an idea of what we are doing. We just recently got the engineering drawings that have real dimensions etc. You make a good point and we will emphasize that we want it exact

I was thinking about changing 3.5 to 4 and I think we will do that. How is the pool for jumping into? Any other caveats about a sport pool?

For the person in austin who did you use initially and who did the fix up?

I dont want to post our builder until it is done

My mess was extensive from the first pool builder (remains without name for now). We got suckered into yes we do this and that and what a good price. A lot of folks say compare pool size, equipment and then you know what you got from a competitor comparison. That is not true based on ordeal I just went through. The how from plumbing, steel, supervision, hydrolics, and equipment selection is the key ....did I say supervision?
We had a bench crack, we had glass tiles pop off the raised spa wall, we had a leak in the plumbing, the spa could not get enough water flow, and finally the pavers were also ....let's say failing due to the install method.

The pool company we hired to fix my pool was Athena Pools. We liked him because he was out at my house supervising his crews. He has an engineering background and you can see it in the way he knew within 5 minutes what needed to be done to my pool. He ended up ripping a bunch of plumbing out and doing it over again, opened up the bench that was cracked, changed some equipment out, did our entire glass tile line over again (showed me it was failing in many places) and finally fixed my pavers. This guy was more about the how to do it than lets go quick and easy. When it was done the pool worked with no leaks or hydrolic issues. Pavers were installed straight and correctly.

We talked to athena but he was 30K more expensive than the next most expensive pool and that didnt even include a patio cover. My wife definitely liked him the best. His bid for something similar to what I have shown was 90K. We ended up going with the 60K bid, which I still think is a bit high for what we are getting. Sylvan bid 50K and another company bid 39K for more of a freeform pool (smaller)

He priced in all sorts of things like 50% breakage on large pavers that we would have to cover. So if we needed 5K of pavers we would actually have to buy 10K worth of stone because 50% would break during transport.

He definitely was knowledgable on the hydrodynamics of pools.

For me he was inline with other bids based on the look we wanted on the redo. We did get a bunch of low balls but we were looking for perfection. Stone is not stone just because it is called the same. You get different grades of leuders. I can tell you the waste was extremely high due to the sizes he was using. if one cracked that stone ended up in the garbage pile. Many pallets did arrive completely broken. In the end he sold the broken pieces to other pool builders and reimbursed me the costs. I was not expecting that.

We did not want any off sizes. The stone did not come clean on the edges so he trimmed every piece of stone to exactly the same template and then placed them exactly in line evenly spaced. He sanded them down, honed the edges to protect them from chipping, and then sealed them. He spent a lot of time compacting the soil he imported, placing drains all over the place, and protecting the soil to avoid shifting by making sure water did not create channels around the elevation we had.
My orig builder threw the stones down chipped , odd sizes, unevenly placed, sinking and whatever, the guy did not touch a saw.

I am guessing he was pricing a lot of labor into your stone work and prep. I can tell you he spent 5-6x more time doing our stone and prep work compared to our orig guy. You always get what you pay for.... I learned that the hard way. It now looks incredible. Now folks say holly smokes.... compared to no comment to a rather trashed aged look.

Good luck with your build.

we want lueders coping and we would like it to be cantilevered. by cantilevered I just want it to hang over the edge instead of being flush with the wall of the pool. The designer said that means we would switch to concrete. Am I using cantilevered the wrong way (ive read cantilevered means poured with the entire deck.

can you cantilever stone coping?

Stone coping is attached to the bond beam with mortar. An expansion joint is set between the deck and the coping.

A canter levered deck is not. It "floats" over the bond beam. This allows the pool and the deck to expand or contract separately.

Scott

we are planning to go with quartz because we are worried about the roughness of pebble. Is the pebble sheen smooth enough? Our pool is a sports pool so there will be a lot of walking

We resurfaced our pool with Pebble Sheen last summer and couldn't be happier. We had plaster before and find the sheen marginally more abrasive. The kids play basketball in the pool for hours and do not seem to suffer from worn feet any more than before.

After 2 days of digging through solid limestone. They are about 3 feet deep
We are thinking about going with pebble sheen instead of quartz (1K cost) and dropping the UV system which I think is about 1K so it is cost neutral. From people that have experienced both, is pebble sheen easy enough on your feet compared to quartz? We will be doing a lot of volleyball, basketball and walking as the pool is a sports pool.

You can see how all our bushes died in the record drought. We were thinking about replacing them with clumping bamboo

Your feet won't know the difference and as the quartz ages, it gets rougher where the PS will keep going and going and going...

The ozone was wasted money anyway, IMHO.

Looks like they are using jack hammers on the rock.

Scott

They are using a jackhammer attached to the back of a case 320 backhoe

They dug some more and cleared out all the rock. Then it rained.. more rain last night than we received all year. They have dug about half the length of the pool down to 3 feet, the rain completely filled it. The jackhammer attachment is completely submerged. I asked my wife if we could just stop here and have a natural limestone pool since the limestone seems to be holding the water...

"From people that have experienced both, is pebble sheen easy enough on your feet compared to quartz?"

I had quartz until last summer when we resurfaced our pool with aqua blue PS. The kids play in the pool for hours and are no worse off compared to before. And, as poolguynj said, the PS will last for LONG time. It's subjective but I sure think PS looks much nicer too.

We will probably go with pebble sheen.

It turns out they dug the deep end off center. They said they overdug the shallow ends so they can move the deep end by just having 8 inches of gunite (they dug 5 ft 8 inches. Is this ok?

Also there is a sewer pipe going through a corner of the pool. They are going to reroute it. Im concerned about angles in the sewer pipe causing clogs. Should I have any concerns about this?

8 Inch floor thickness is fine, especially with the limestone below.

As for the sewer line, as long as the sweep needed is made a few feet further back and there is enough pitch, it should be fine.

Scott

Well the rebar is done, these guys are moving fast!

Wanted to include some pictures so people can see if the rebar job is ok

Spa

closeup of tying rebar

can see sewer line cutting across corner - it goes through the limestone!

Overall view of the pool. You can see where the deep portion is too close to the spa/tanning ledge

skimmer?

when we talk about pool depth are we talking water depth or pool wall height. We want 5 ft, but because they dug incorrectly the pool wall height will be 5ft and the water depth will prob be 4' 6" is this normal? Or when we say the pool depth is 5ft do we mean 5ft of water and a wall depth of 5' 6"?

So pool builder is recommending we go to 6 inches under the area that is 5 ft of water depth. The actual amount of pool at that thickness is small, maybe 2-3 feet by 17 feet. Is this ok?

We have a 2hp 2 spd pump, builder is recommending 6 jets max. I read on another forum that 2hp can do 8 jets.

Any thoughts about that?

Depends on the jets and plumbing.

Scott

Gunite is going in right now

Gunite is done, it took about 7 hours

There is about 3 inches missing from the middle corner of the spa. They said it is easily fixed with plaster. Not sure why they didnt just gunite it.

From my limited experience, plaster follows the curves of what is already there. It can not be used to fill in large holes like that. The PB will probably use hydraulic cement. But being on the corner edge like that, it is strange that the shooters just didn't finish it off with gunite.