Week 1 : 10 - 16 Sep.

Monday
The guys arrived early on Monday and got straight to work ripping up the lawn before the site supervisor arrived with the pool template. By the end of the day we had one seriously big hole.

It seems as if our block was the dumping block at the end of the development - from about 250mm to 1250mm seems to be just road base, it even had some kerbing in it, big stuff too! It has meant that the digging has been quite slow and difficult at times. Fortunately we haven't hit any rock yet, just some big boulders about half the size of the bob cat bucket - the guys have an excavator with them but that would mean more cost and time.

Tuesday
The pool was due at 12:30 so the guys still had a hard task ahead of them. Once the bob cat was finished in the hole, he started to bring through the loads of yellow sand for the back filling and screeding of the base. Meanwhile the base of the ramp had to be dug out by hand and that's where we found the big rocks! Fortunately we were able to move these by hand but one needed three of us to man-handle out of the hole.

11:30
The hole was pretty complete - I watered the sand down while the other two spread the yellow sand over the base and got the levels right.

Midday
Right on 12:00 the installers turned up to prepare the base - they just had to check the levels and screed the base smooth ready for the pool.

12:15
The pool and crane had arrived and were parked in the road down the side. Once the hole was determined to be ready they hoisted the pool over the wall and placed it gently in the hole, then spent about five minutes finalising the position before disconnecting from the crane.

Finally they dropped some sand down the sides to about one third up the sides and started filling it. It could only be filled to about one third so as to avoid excessive inward or outward pressure on the shell.

I was very impressed up to this point, except with the installers who dumped some of their lunch rubbish at the back of the garden - empty cartons, bottles and wrappers!

Thursday
The guys came back to complete the backfilling - filling the rest of the gap between the pool and ground up to the top and filling the pool with water. They also installed the pump and filter, unfortunately not as instructed to/by Marcus, locating them very proud of the wall at the shallow end (rather than along the wall) such that there will be no way to get past once the conservatory goes up.

I phoned Lyn (getting a reply eventually) our Customer Liaison (hah!) Officer who simply fobbed me off the Marcus, the site manager, and despite the intro letter telling me to call her OR Marcus. As it happened, when I phoned his mobile number I got a message saying he no longer worked for the company and I should phone head office. After trying to contact her a few more times (and failing, she DOESN'T return calls it seems) I eventually contacted the site supervisor who was only too happy to help. Arranged that he would come back next week to rearrange the pump and filter.

Sunday
I moved some four or five metres of excess sand off the lawn.

So far, so good...