House Update

Not too much to report this week. Ian made it down to the house on his bike! Yeah! And the updates are that the plumbing in the kitchen is done, and the electrical looks mostly done. Lots of wires in the walls. I'll go down this weekend to update some pictures and see what else is new.

We also met last weekend with another pool builder. This pool builder is the biggest in the area (and probably one of the more expensive ones). We came up with a design that I like better than the first one. Once I can figure out how to show you guys a .pdf file, you can take a look at it.

This design has a raised deck area (about 1 foot up) on the other side of the pool, that we can put lounge chairs or a table or something on. Then a waterfall comes off this area into the pool. I think we are going to put the pool closer to the patio, we'll have about 13 feet of grass (most likely grass) behind the pool and another like 15 feet to the right of the pool.

I think we are really leaning towards not getting an in ground spa and getting an above ground one instead. The in ground ones are like twice as expensive and they only have a few jets. Doesnt' seem to be too customizable. We are thinking that the only upside of having in ground is for the looks and it doesn't seem worth $5000 for that. We thought it would be cool to have the hot tub next to the raised area too.

We also went all out on pool equipment stuff for this pool. Got a salt water system (~$1400) instead of chlorine. A friend of mine has this, and the water feels much better than chlorine. A ozonator (~500), which is supposed to help with sanatizing the pool and reduce the amount of salt or chlorine you would need to use. Also got an in ground cleaning system, this is one of the more expensive options, about 3000, but its supposed to be really low maintenance and keep the pool sparkling.

So...grand total for the pool....32,000....ugghhh...maybe we will win the lottery!

We meet with one more pool builder this weekend and then we were going to have this new design priced by the first guy as well.

Another interesting thing we found out, is our house may be on expansive soil, so that makes the whole pool building even more expensive. Aren't we lucky! So we need to ask the first guy to see if he does anything special for expansive soil (the second builder, Shasta did) and what the guarantee is.

So, if anyone has any knowledge about general pool stuff, feel free to share. I'll try to figure out how to get the design up here soon (if you have any ideas about that too, let me know!)