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.

• 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.

• Saturday, February 22, 2003 - I added the Epilogue page and some other files under "Miscellaneous."

• 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 ... 

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 ;)

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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!

• 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.

• 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 ...

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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. 

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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" ...
  

• 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.  :)

• 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 ...

• 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_"

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Sunday, September 15, 2002 - Added the City Pre-Gunite Inspection page.  I had to update a few things to the end of the plumbing 3rd day that I had forgotten about in arranging for the inspection.

• 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!

• 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.

• 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).

• Monday, September 2, 2002 - The second day of plumbing has been added.

• 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!

   

• Sunday, August 18, 2002 - I added the excavation page and made some minor tweaks to a few other pages.

• 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.