Plumbing and Pool Equipment

I don't have a picture of the plumbing because they dug the trenches, laid the pipes and covered the trenches so it looks basically the same as it did before the plumbing was done. However, this is what my backyard looked like on Sunday. The weather here is so unpredictable. Friday temperatures were a nice 72 degrees. I was wearing a nice summer dress with no sweater. Sunday morning, E comes downstairs to tell me that we have snow. It must have been 6-8 inches on my lawn furniture. I ran out and took one picture and ran back inside. I am ready for the spring. Snow snow go away! Which it did later that afternoon.

Monday morning, no snow was left and so the pool builder was out and about with the next step in our pool project, digging trenches for the plumbing. All the equipment was delivered to be installed on Tuesday so things are definitely moving a long.

Last night, I made my tile and stone choices. Here is what I selected. I hope it ends up looking like what I envision.

For my spa, I chose the stone to be dry stacked. I don't like seeing grout so this is perfect. I like how it looks very natural.

We originally like the irregular stacked stone shown below, but we see that all the time and so we wanted something a little different.
Our waterline tile will be these little tiles. It matches our kitchen completely, tying our indoors with our outdoors. Once again, I liked the natural stone look. It will also tie into the tiles on the slide.

Our slide will be tiled like this one. However, we had to choose a different tile for the slide. I liked the way this one looks, but with little kids, we wanted a slick and smooth tile that had rounded edges. So this is what we went with.
Surprise surprise, it is stone colored as well. The grotto will look like the picture above where there is a ledge in the middle with rocks gradually coming down. However, the entire structure will be more massive like this one.

We did not want our kids to have to climb a ladder to get to the top of the slide like most slides require. We paid the additional stone costs to have small gradual steps to the top like this picture. Of course that takes up more pool and deck space, but we feel it will be worth it. We have a play set that requires our kids to climb up to the slide and I cringe every time I see my 1 year old try to be like his big brothers climbing up the ladder.

For our pool finish, we selected this exposed aggregate color. We haven't seen it yet which makes me nervous. We are supposed to tour some pools in the coming weeks to make sure this is indeed the color we want.


We wanted a dark blue greyish color. We did not want the teal green color that white plaster projects. Hopefully, this color will give us the lagoonish feel we are trying to get. I like the pool on the right, but not the one on the left. I suppose the color changes depending upon the sun.

I also like this aggregate color, black onyx, but I wonder if it is going to be too hot in the summer. The really dark color will raise the temperature waters.




They are going to try to tile and rock the pool this week. It is supposed to rain today and tomorrow so I don't know how much can actually get done. However, Friday should be a great weather day so if they are able to start and finish this week, we will be ahead of schedule. All that will be left is decking and spraying the pool finish.

Projected completion date is still by April 16th which is close to four weeks away. That is crazy to me because I predicted at the start of this process, it would definitely be in May. Hopefully, I didn't jinx myself by saying that.