New Updates
Old Update Log
Before I moved the old site over to phpNuke (which has a built-in new
updates/announcements feature),
I kept a little
chronological log of new updates to the original website on this page. I
kept it around for historical reasons. You may find it interesting
following along how each phase of the pool construction progressed and the time
frame in which it progressed.
CONTINUED BELOW
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Tuesday, May 6, 2003 - I just added a few updated pictures
with the completed landscaping around the pool area. You
can see them in the Finished Product page.
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Saturday, February 22, 2003 - I added the Epilogue page and
some other files under "Miscellaneous."
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Saturday, February 15, 2003 - I can't believe it. The
pool is finally done. I've gone ahead and filled
the pool along with bringing in the startup
company. After that, SW Gas had to come back out to swap my gas
meter from a 250K to a 425K meter to accommodate the new gas
heater. I have some final pictures
of the completed pool. Also, I started a little water
chemistry log page that will follow my efforts to get my pool water
balanced. Beyond that, I'll be posting a final epilogue on a separate
page in a few days. This epilogue will really be a write-up of the
lessons I've learned through this experience and just a general post-mortem
of the project. I'll also be updating the site with cost
information and a bunch of other miscellaneous information as time permits.
I just wanted to thank everyone who has followed along with this project
giving me timely information and input at each step of the way, especially
the folks up at the Pool
Forum, which I think is the best pool site on the Internet. I hope
you had as much fun going along for the ride as I had doing it. This
website has been fun to do, but its a huge understatement to say that I'm
glad its finally over. Now its time to enjoy the pool ...
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Saturday, February 8, 2003 - Wow I can't believe its been over
a month since I last did anything major with the pool. The time off has been
good and relaxing, but now its time to get back into the swing of
things. The pool season is still a few months off, but I decided to
finish up the pool so that I can get the equipment started and put through
its paces. Also, I thought it would be a good idea to start messing
with the water chemistry. The final major sub is the interior sub, who
is responsible for the surface coating on the pool. We decided to go
with a pebble interior over the conventional
Marcite plaster for its durability and its tropical look. It took
almost a full day to do the Pebble-Tec, than an additional few hours the
next day to finish up with the acid washing.
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Sunday, January 19, 2003 - I finally received the Pool
Solutions PS-233 test kit in the mail. I had ordered it before
Christmas, so I was somewhat disappointed that it wasn't in the mailbox when
I arrived back in Arizona. Fortunately, it came a few days
later. I was pretty stoked and wanted to test it out right away, but
couldn't get to it till Saturday. I put up a page with my
out-of-the-box experience with the PS-233 testkit and got back my initial
test results with the fill water I'm going to use and the soft water that
I'm planning to top off the pool with.
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Friday, January 17, 2003 - No real work updates today. I
just had a little scare the other day when I noticed that the Shotcrete
shell was leaking water. The first thought that came to mind was,
"The Shotcrete shell is 6" thick, how can it be leaking
water?" The second thought that came to mind was, "Why did
ever decide to do this pool myself?" Then I found out that its a
fairly normal occurrence. Go figure. It was an interesting
enough situation that I decided to write it up. I also got the djpeg/cjpeg
utilities working (to compress images on the website). I was able to
compress a bunch of the large images such that the size of the files went
down by 50% while causing no visible degradation in the quality of the image
from the original. I freed up about 20MB of disk space by running it
on the images from the BBQ work only. Very cool - thanks again for the
tip Jacob! I also just received my PS233 test kit in the mail
today. Once I unpack it and read through everything, I'll post my
results on the tap water.
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Tuesday, January 14, 2003 - I arrived back in the Valley of the
Sun yesterday about 1am. I didn't make it into bed until 2am. It
was quite an exhausting flight. I had a blast, but I must admit
getting into work this morning was somewhat of a challenge. I think
I'm OK now, though. I was able to complete the City
Inspection #2 page on the 5 hr flight back to Phoenix. One thing I
found quite interesting about the whole 2nd inspection experience was that
if a kid crawls over my fence despite me passing the City of Chandler
barrier requirements and any additional best efforts on top of that to
child-proof it, I'm still liable for it. I was encouraged to put a
lock on my gate (not required) just in case - but oh BTW, you can still get
sued. Oh well ... Oh yeah, I passed the inspection in case you
were wondering ;)
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Thursday, January 9, 2003 - I'm having such a great time in
Honolulu, I don't know if I want to go back home now. In between
heading out to the beach and going to our favorite island digs, I had a
chance to finish the cleanup page. I now
only have to finish up the inspection page (I'll do that on the plane trip
back to AZ), and I'll be all caught up. One of the highlights of our
trip was heading out to Hanauma Bay in
the Hawaii-Kai area (where my wife and I grew up) of Honolulu. It was
our kid's first trip to Hanauma and our first in about 20 years.
Hanauma Bay is a marine preserve where a live coral reef exists. No
fishing is allowed there and over the years, the fish have grown tame and
are very unabashed about swimming along side of snorkelers. I rented
an underwater camera, hoping to get some great fish pics, but the camera
wasn't working properly. The pictures I got back were terrible.
I'm planning to take my son again tomorrow, so hopefully, they'll let us use
the camera again - maybe one that works this time. This trip has also
been useful in giving me some ideas on how to landscape the backyard once
the pool is done. I don't know how well tropical plants will do in the
dry AZ heat, but I'm going to give it a try.
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Saturday, January 4, 2003 - Happy New Years everyone!
I'm actually in Hawaii right now taking a couple of weeks off visiting with
family and friends. Everything for the pool is done except for the
pebble-tec and I wanted to wait until I got back to fill up the pool.
In the meantime, I still had a boat load of pictures from all the previous
work waiting to be completed. I brought a laptop with me so that I
would have something to do on the plane and was able to crank out the pages
that describe the BBQ Island Painting / Dam wall
Flatrock work and the work needed to meet all the Barrier
Codes for the City of Chandler. Its been nice to be able to take a
little break, get away, and dig into some Ono Hawaiian food. Since
arriving back in the islands, I've had a chance to get reacquainted with
Limu Tako/Ahi Poke. I also tried some Oyster Poke for the first time,
which was amazingly good. For New Year's, Doreen's folks had all the
relatives over and we chowed down on prime rib and Alaskan King Crab.
It was a great time.
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Monday, December 23, 2002 - Just a small update today. I
had to replace the front gate since the excavators came through and tore it
down to get access to the backyard. I've been wanting to replace it
with a bigger 8' RV style double-gate and this gave me the opportunity to do
it. Its actually also a big part of meeting the barrier code that will
be checked during the final (pre-plaster) inspection. I have a small blurb up on the
Gate Fence work. I also included the miscellaneous
gas hookups that Ray came back to do (fire ring and heater hookup).
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Sunday, December 22, 2002 - The Decking
Acrylic page is finally done. I gotta admit, I'm getting kind of
lazy now. Losing some of the enthusiasm for updating these pages with
each phase. I'm glad I'm almost done. Thanks to Jacob DeGlopper
for showing me the "djpeg and cjpeg" utilities to further compress
the large images I have on the website. He put up a test page for me
showing the differences between the original large image and the compressed
ones and man, I couldn't tell the difference. It was amazing.
The best part about it was that in most cases, it achieve a 4:1 file size
compression ratio. Simply amazing. My webhosting service thought
that those would be good utilities to install globally for all their
customers, so while they are installing those on my Linux shell account, I'm
going to continue full bore to put up the large images. Thanks Jake!
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Wednesday, December 18, 2002 - I told a friend at work last
week about
this site and he told me that he recently finished a pool too (about a month
or so ago). The other day he told me that he also decided not to do tile,
but is regretting it because the staining on the waterline is a huge
eye-sore. Huh?? Scaling (or so I thought) only after a month or
two?? Impossible. I had to see for myself. I was so
intrigued that I drove over to his house earlier this week to check it out
for myself. What I was to find out that day boggled my mind. It
was a really bizarre and sad tale. Read about Jerry's
Story here.
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Saturday, December 14, 2002 - Wow - no updates for 2 weeks,
then 2 updates within hours of each other. Talk about extremes, eh?. Actually, this
is a small update. I have the BBQ tiling
page up now. I noticed that I'm getting close to my maximum storage
allowance on my web hosting service. I'm allowed 500MB of storage and
I'm currently sitting at 390MB. I already know that the Acrylic pages
are going to be horrendous along with cleanup and final interior/pebble-tec.
In order to conserve space, I decided to not put up any large images for the
BBQ tiling page. In fact, what I may do is delete all the large images
for ALL the BBQ pages since its just ancillary work anyways. Sorry
about that, but you gotta do what you gotta do. If I cross over 500MB,
my monthly service charge doubles since I would be entering into the next
level of premium service. That's life ...
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Friday, December 13, 2002 - Its been about 2 weeks since I've added
anything significant to the site. I have the Tile
page up now. I decided not to do tile on the pool/spa. It
was another tough decision, but read the page to find out why I decided to
not go that route.
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Saturday, December 7, 2002 - Man, this Lou guy is taking this
building-your-own-pool thing wwaaayyy to seriously! Check out this
his posting on poolforum.com.
Get a cup of coffee first and find a comfortable place to sit before reading
it. It'll be hard to put down until you're done reading it. You
go LouMan.
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Friday, December 6, 2002 - No real updates today. I
just wanted to mention Lou Young. He emailed me last week and said
he's also doing his own pool. No, but he's _really_
doing his own pool. He did his own layout, and is planning to do the
plumbing, electrical, and a bunch of other stuff on his own as well.
Now there's a real man for you. I give him credit. I have no
confidence to do any of that. I just cheat and pick up the
telephone. Of course, knowing what I know now, I might consider doing
some ... of ... the .. NOT. You're a good man, Lou.
BTW, he's also from Arizona. He also put together a website: http://louyoung.com/pool/
Its not as developed as he would like, but one thing that impressed me was
the detailed cost breakdown of everything that he did. Look at the
/Pool/ subdirectory where he has all his information. He also has a
list of sub-contractors there, a MS Project file, and a bunch of other
interesting stuff. BTW, he said he starts excavation tomorrow at 6am
sharp. Yeehawl.
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Sunday, December 1, 2002 - The electrical phase is officially
over now that the Aqualink installation is wrapped up. I have the
pages up for the Aqualink RS8 controller
system installation up now. What a painful weekend. My DSL
provider's network went out on Friday night and they offered me a dial-up
line for the weekend as a temporary replacement. I had a blazingly
fast 26kbps dial-up line to upload 40MB worth of images. What's even
better is that upload speed seemed to get slower as time went on. It
took almost the whole day to upload all the images.
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Sunday, November 24, 2002 - The pages seem to get longer and
longer as I go forward. The second day
of Decking (concrete pour) is up and its seems like its twice as big as
the decking forms page. Oh well, can't help that. It looks like
I'm doing about a page a week now. I'm slowing way down due to work,
but this is the last week of my current project/contract. After this
week, I go back "on the bench" so to speak. I should have
more time then. I visited a Leslie's Pool Supplies store this weekend
to get their take on the whole "Can you use soft water to fill your
pool?" question. George Estep had started a thread
on poolforum.com to discuss issues regarding this and it really intrigued
me. I have a hose bib with soft water coming out of it and could
easily tap off of that to feed my auto-water leveler. The guy I talked
to in the store said that the only issue that he was aware of was that if
your calcium concentration is too low, calcium will actually be extracted
out of the pool interior until it gets to some equilibrium point. He
said that this is not good for plaster surfaces, but he didn't know for sure
what it would do to pebble interiors. He said that it would be best to
fill the pool with hard water then use the soft water source for re-filling
as needed with the AWL. He said that once the pool is filled, the
challenge is then to keep the calcium down as low as possible to keep the
scaling to a minimum. I need to learn more about this.
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Saturday, November 16, 2002 - Its seems like forever since
I've last posted. I've been swamped at work, so I haven't had time to
do much lately. Well, here's the long awaited first
day of the decking. On this day, all they did was put up the
forms, but there was so much detail that I wanted to capture that it ended
up being twice as big as the shotcrete page. Sorry about the
length. Its REALLY a pig over 56K dialup, so be patient. I also
did up a landscaping utilities page to show you my thinking in planning for
various landscape items: low-voltage landscape wiring, drip system tubing
and water mains for additional spigots throughout the back, and even some
extra utility stuff like CAT5 Ethernet cabling for a waterproof outdoor
network port and speaker wire. Its all there in the landscaping
utilities page. I also have some minor additions for some extra
work from my gas sub. I've also made some minor additions/corrections
to some other older pages (shotcrete, gas). Just one note of
warning: When you look at the arrows on the bottom of the
pages, its going to look like they're are out of order and all messed
up. It not. I've double checked them. Its that
during the decking phase, the tile guy came through, the electrician came to
finish up, the gas sub was in twice, I put down utility sleeves on two
separate days myself. In short - it was a complete mess! Again,
if you follow the arrows on the bottom of the pages, it will take you to the
next work item in strict time sequential order. This may not
necessarily be in the exact order as in the Table of Contents. The
Table of Contents is in time sequential order at a high-level, but when subs
had to come back another day for additional items, that's when the order got
all mixed up. I hope that makes sense.
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Saturday, November 2, 2002 - The second day of the BBQ is up.
From here its going to get a bit messy. There's going to be a flurry
of different subs coming in the next few weeks. In between the decking
guys putting up the form and pouring the concrete, I had the gas sub come
back to set a valve for the fire pit, the electrical guys coming in to
finish up the Aqua-Link controller, and the BBQ guy coming back to do tiling
and put up the pilasters for the front gate (so that I can pass my barrier
code for final inspection). If you follow the arrows/links at the
bottom of each page, that will take you through each sub in time sequential
fashion. It will jump around all over the place, but it will be in
strict chronological order. The Table of Contents (TOC) just organizes
everything in logical fashion (but at a high-level, also in chronological
order).
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Friday, November 1, 2002 - I have the first day of BBQ building
up. There were a lot of updates to the BBQ page in general. I
added some additional pictures of some work from another sub I was
considering. Also, I updated the pre-decking pages with more
information. One blunder I made was to incorrectly describe the Pier
System that Dodge Concrete uses. After talking it over with Wayne
Dodge more, I realized that they don't FILL the hole with Masonite, they
just throw a thin Masonite board ON TOP of the hole. The purpose is to
just keep the concrete from falling into the hole and not to keep the hole
intact that I incorrectly thought earlier. The hole itself
keeps its shape and stays intact due to the high clay content in the
soil. Sorry if I've lead anyone astray, but I've corrected the
information and you can find it in the decking page. Also, I've been
following an interesting poolforum
thread started by Jose and there have been some great information added
there recently. I've taken the liberty to add some information that
Kevin Masuhara posted and you can see it all in the pre-decking page.
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Thursday, October 24, 2002 - Sorry if it feels like you've
been thrown for
a loop. I reversed the order of the updates. The latest is at
the top and oldest is at the bottom. You can blame it on
Greg Smith (Long Island, NY) who suggested it. :) Just kidding Greg -
I was planning to do it anyways but got busy. Thanks for the kick in
the pants. I think this page will be a little more natural to read
now, albeit taking a little time to get used to the new format. I got
a chance to put in the pre-BBQ work pages. I really spent (wasted?) a
lot of time going round and round with the BBQ design so there's enough
information there to fill up a full page even before the actual work
started. There were so many issues that I couldn't make up my mind
on. Read all the gory details in the BBQ
section. Also, I got a chance to update the decking
page with some additional information that Jose
Raffucci (regular from poolforum) provided. You can see his
posting
here. I also spoke with Sonja over at the Shotcrete company. She's
the person who takes the calls and does up the bids when you call
them. She's real nice and helpful and has been with them for 7 years
now. She also gave me the names of some of the other crew guys so I
updated the shotcrete page. Now I don't
have to refer to the "guy with the long hair" ...
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Monday, October 21, 2002 - Haven't gotten to decking, but I got a lot of
information concerning decking issues
from subs and various other people that
I thought folks would find interesting. I did kind of a pre-decking
page that discusses all these kinds of issues prior to the deck subs coming
in. I also put in a placeholder for the BBQ island that I'm
building. It comes before the decking, so I skipped a phase.
Sorry. Also, I know the BBQ is not a part of the pool, but I want to
document it anyways since its a part of the overall construction project
that I'm doing. And since this is my site, I can do anything I spankin'
want. :)
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Friday, October 18, 2002 - Big change today. Not with the
site, but with the hosting server. I've been borrowing space from Rois'
server since the website's inception running off his DSL line from
home. Everything was going along smoothly until I made the
"mistake" of posting my website to some Usenet construction
forums. His server got slammed so hard that he had to block access to certain
sites that were hitting it the hardest until things calmed down. Sorry
Rois! I had
been meaning to register my own domain and get a real web hosting service,
and this incident was as good as any excuse to finally take the plunge. I
registered the "bschoi.com" domain with www.registerfly.com for
$10. Also, I got 500MB of space with 8GB transfer allowance/month from
www.manlius.com for about $3.75/month. Not a bad deal Its amazing
how low the prices have gotten. Back to the website, I did notice
that a lot of the "large" images from the plumbing and steel pages
were missing (or I was too lazy to put them up - don't remember now), so I
added a bunch more large images to those pages. Also, a marketing
person from the Shotcrete company contacted me and said she saw the pages.
She supplied me the names of some of the other crew members and I updated
the shotcrete page with that as well. Richard Kinch from www.truetex.com
contacted me and told me that shotcrete is not applied at 3000psi. Its
right about 100psi. Don't recall where I got that information from,
but thanks to Rich for that correction. Rich actually did similar work
for his own pool. Go to his site and check it out. He also
created his own chlorination control system using Linux. Pretty cool
stuff. Well, that's about all I
had time for. Like I mentioned earlier, I've been swamped lately at
work so I've put the pool on hold for a few weeks. I'm resuming by
building the BBQ island starting on Monday. The decking will come
after that ...
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Saturday, October 12, 2002 - Nothing big today, just wanted to
update the site with a lot of odds-and-ends type stuff that I've been meaning
to do for awhile. Most of the changes are to the
"Miscellaneous" area - approved pool drawings back from the City,
plot plans, and other drawings you've seen before. I also added some
items to the TOC in anticipation of some work that will be happening
soon. Probably the most
interesting thing is the pool diary, which I had kept long before the
website was even a thought. I kept detailed records of all my
conversations with anyone who had anything to do with the pool. I put
it on there to give a glimpse of what a typical day looks like when you
are attempting to GC a pool yourself. If nothing else, it will cause
you to run as fast as you can or cause you to say, "yeah, I can do
_that_"
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Thursday, October 10, 2002 - Ok, it looks like I'm officially
caught up with the website. I've updated the site with the
2nd day of gas.
Right now, I'm getting ready to call the deck sub in. I've held up for a few weeks
now partly because I've been so busy at work, but also because there are a lot of
considerations in the deck area that haven't been settled in my mind. The biggest
concern is the location of the BBQ / FP. The two biggest considerations for that
are trying to maximize the deck area for patio furniture, and locating the BBQ/FP to
make drainage easier. I'll talk more about that when the deck pages go up.
For now, I can say I'm all caught up. Enjoy.
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Monday, October, 7, 2002 - Man,
what a hectic weekend! Rois had his server go down on late Friday - this was
the server I was sharing space on for my website. His SoftRAID device crashed
and all the data was lost. He got things back up on Saturday, but what he had
restored was an older version of my pages. It wasn't until late Sunday night
that I got things back to normal. In the meantime, I had the opportunity to
update the first day for Gas work.
I may actually be catching up here.
When I finish day #2 gas, I will be officially caught up. I also had some
time to update some of the electrical pages with some code information. I've
had a rousing discussion with George and Carl about GFCI protection recently.
They made some reasonable points, but I'm still concerned about running unprotected
and protected wires in the same raceway (which is against code) if I put breakers
on the pool pump circuits. I'll talk to Mike about it this week to see what
he thinks.
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Tuesday, October 1, 2002 - Whew, the bulk of the electrical work
is done. I have the page up for the
3rd day of electrical. The most
intense wiring was done on the 3rd day. The bulky main run wiring was done
on the 2nd day,
but the detailed wiring at the sub-panel and Aqua-link Power Center
was done on the 3rd day. All that remains for electrical is to hook up the
remaining Aqualink parts (spa-side remote, and in-house controller). I also
added some additional info that I had forgotten about for the first inspection.
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Friday, September 27, 2002 - I finally got a chance to finish the
2nd
day of electrical. Not too bad - the work took place back on 9/17 - I'm only
ten days behind (hehe). I reworked
electrical first day. I added a few
more Aqualink pictures. I also re-read my overview of what I wanted to do
forelectrical and noticed that it was just a big block of text. Yuck. It
definitely could have been formatted better. I fixed it by replacing it with
anumbered list. I suspect there are many other areas on the site likethat.
If you see anything like that, please let me know and I'll put it onmy list of things
to re-work when time permits. Also, Pat from Rockworks happened to wander
onto the site and got a chance to read the rockwork section. He provided
some additional informationabout the type of boulders they used for the job and some
behind the scenes info about the rock quarry.
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Saturday, September 21, 2002 - Added the rockworks
page. I also added a bunch
of extra information to the shotcrete
and steel pages to explain the process a
little more in depth.
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Tuesday, September 17, 2002 - Added the shotcrete
page. Added some add'l info
in steel page
and made some spelling corrections: Its gunite, not gunnite.
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Saturday, September 14, 2002 - Added the
electrical rough
page. The electrical guys just did the minimal rough work needed to pass
the pre-gunite inspection. They'll be back to do the real work. I
tweaked a few other pages for some minor corrections (prereq for steel and
clarification of check-valves in plumbing section). For some reason, the
gas sub keeps getting pushed back further and further. Since he doesn't
depend on anyone and he just has to be in before the deck gets poured, I moved
the gas sub in the table of contents to just before the decking. Sorry
Ray (AZ Gas Piping), don't mean to dog you. You've been great!
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Tuesday, September 10, 2002 - Added the
2nd day of steel work and the
3rd day of plumbing.
The 3rd day of plumbing actually came after
electrical, so the table of contents doesn't have it in the right order.
Thats Ok though. Its neater if I just keep all the plumbing pages
together. If you follow the "Next" links on each page, it should
take you through everything in time sequential order. I've got a lot of
stuff I want to put down for electrical, so I'm going to hold off on that until
later this week. I also added a picture of an Ortega check-valve to the
day two plumbing page.
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Saturday, September 7, 2002 - Added the first
day of steel work. I've made
some additions to the excavation page
to mention an issue with the waterfall pad
that carried over to steel. I also made some minor tweaks on various pages
(intro, camera, plumbing).
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Sunday, September 1, 2002 - I've added the
first day of the
plumbing work and have touched/updated just about every other page.
I've added additional information in areas (like excavation) that some
people found helpful, also added an additional
section that goes through
my thought process of selecting the equipment and consider other options
that normally going into build a pool. I talk about:
- Filtration Systems: Sand vs. DE vs. Cartridge
- Cleaning Systems: In-floor vs. conventional Pool Vac
- Chlorination Systems: Standard vs. Salt Walter vs. Ozonators
- Interior: Plaster vs. Pebble-Tec
I've also moved the discussion of how I arrived at my valve scheme out of
the plumbing section and put it into its own section marked
"Pumps/Valves."
Beyond that, I've made some minor additions/modifications here and there
with stuff that was incorrect or stuff that I just plain forgot about. Its
taken me a lot longer to update the site lately as I've
had a flurry of subs in this week. The steel and electrical are
actually done, but I'm guessing I won't be able to put those pages up for
another week. Enjoy!
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Sunday, August 18, 2002 - I added the
excavation
page and made some minor tweaks to a few
other pages.
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Wednesday, August 14, 2002 - Finally got my act together and put together the start of the
website. At this point in the construction,
bluestake has come through
and the layout has already taken place. The excavators should be up in
a few days. I've added a bunch of background info that documents my
journey from looking for a pool builder to do my pool to being convinced of
subbing it out myself.
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