A pool once lived here...

Happy Sunday everybody.

Now that the weather is cooler, I am taking the time to write about renovating rather than renovating itself. I need a break too....before I begin the big exterior paint adventure.

Let's take a walk outside....

As I mentioned in a previous post we once had a pool. The pool was a fibreglass structure with enormous cracks and holes where the dirt was slowly making its way in. The decision to remove the pool was a 'no-brainer' that is because we are less than 200m from an amzing beach and we didn't want pay the crazy electricity costs in running the filter 24/7. It took us 3 months to get organised as there were some planning questions that needed to be resolved. Essentially when you live close (100m or less) to the coast in South Australia you require planning consent to bring in clean fill (I think it is 9 cubic metres or more from memory). This isn't a huge amount but lucky for us I resolved that we didn't need approval because we are more than 100m from the coast, we were not removing the pool entirely and we were not going to be building any habitable rooms (generally these are the loungeroom and bedrooms)over the location of the pool once filled. Presto - pool demolition was happening. If you were going to be building a dwelling over where a pool or any other large hole once was you will require a compaction report from an engineer. This is very important as the earth will move considerably if you don't compact it and then build over it. Think cracked flooring, sunken foundations, cracked walls etc...not pleasant so its worth spending the time and money having this done. Cost wise this is around $5-$8k.....

For us, it was more of a drain, bash and fill mission. Firstly we disconnected the electricity which ran into the pool and around the front (underwater pool light and bollard lighting around the periphery of the pool). Then we used the filter in reverse and drained the pool into our sewer. Once most of the water was gone we used a drill with a 30cm drill bit and bored more than 1000 holes throughout the pool shell (a job Mr Renovator loved by the way). We then removed all the coping pavers. A bobcat and more than 30,000 cubic metres of clean fill was brought in. We filled the pool a third of the way to the top with fill and then pooled water over the top to help compact it. We added a layer of gravel to help stablise and then the final layer of clean fill which we flooded to again help with the compaction. All up this exercise cost us around $2000 and took 5 days with the bobcat only working half days in mornings to technically it took 3 full days.

The white structure in the second photo is the old bessa block shed....which you guessed it, has also been removed. I'll post these photos tomorrow with a before and after of our backyard. It's taken us a year but we got there in the end.

X S.