Pool Construction Under Way!

It has been a very busy week!

The pool construction started on Tuesday morning with Rick and his 5t Yanmar excavator. It was super exciting to get things moving and everyone had a mile wide smile on their face - for about 25 minutes.

Rick and the 5t Yanmar getting started

Our block is on the side of a hill that runs down into a valley below. Before the house was built, to get some extra flat ground some rather large retaining walls were constructed and clean fill was trucked in from around the area to flatten the block. Normal practice is to lay the fill in 300mm steps and compact with the excavator prior to the next load/layer. It is now apparent to us that no compaction occured. Naughty, naughty naughty peoples...

So what I hear you say, well the pool builder Stuart, expected there to be a need for additional piers to be dug and concreted for the foundations to secure the pool and I learnt pretty quickly, and as you would expect, all foundations must be keyed into natural earth, not fill.

The house itself has solid foundations, the flat area for its construction was cut at the same time the retaining walls were built.

After reaching the pool depth at the West end of the pool, Rick fitted up his 300mm auger and set about digging the first pier, after about two or three minutes it became obvious that the loose concrete and rocks in the fill would not allow the auger to dig. Plan B was to use his 300mm bucket and dig the footing, not ideal but the best option available. After digging for 15 minutes he had reached the dig limit of his excavator and was not yet into natural. Plan C was then swung into action, the dig was called off and another larger machine was booked for Wednesday morning.

Hole nuber two - only 3.5 cubic metres in this one.

Wednesday morning Paul from Edge Earthmoving arrived and got digging, unfortunately due to the nature of the earth surrounding the pier, the hole just kept getting bigger and bigger! At this stage I was getting very concerned, all I could see was $$$$$$ and all I could hear was kaching, kaching every time the bucket pulled another pile of dirt out that would need to be filled with concrete. The scene from the Castle came to mind, I could see Darryl Kerrigan saying "tell 'em, go on tell 'em... Dale dug a hole, tell 'em Dale... he started the patio", then Sal saying "good onya Dale".

Paul and his 8t Hitachi digging hole number four

The build engineer decided we would not need eight piers but now only six due to the sheer size of them, which was a slight relief. Paul decided wisely after completing the third hole that he would not proceed with hole five and six until the largest hole was filled. This would prevent futher collapse of the already excavated holes. Paul stood down his machine and did not charge me the time he had to wait until the concrete pumper and ag turned up. This was extremely generous of him and saved us about $400.

The first massive hole being filled with six cubic metres of concrete.

The holes in the ground were enormous, but got smaller as the holes were dug to the East, however, six cubic metres is a lot of concrete and the need for extra concrete in the piers has blown a big hole into pool budget reserves. Contract variances are a pain in the freckle, but in this case unavoidable.

Using the bucket in hole number five to prevent collapse as it is filled

Dad, I dug another hole...

Preparing to dig the final pier.

The box and steel work contactor got to work yesterday, and while it looks as though not much has been done, they have got quite a bit completed, in what is now a much larger job due to the soil collapse that occured on every dig face.

Form work commenced

Form work for the feature wall

There was quite a large dig allowance included in the quote and given we were not getting our fill carted away we should be able to recoup a portion of dig allowance for the variance from the extra in the piers, the soil from the dig will be used to make another flat area at the bottom of our block below the two existing retaining walls, this area will be properly compacted and levelled thus allowing me to build a small adventure playground for the kids and complete our garden to the boundary of our property.

The dirt that was excavated make big piles.

The piles of dirt are difficult to scale due to the photos but I have worked out that there is roughly 70 cubic metres of soil that will be spread and compacted to provide a small level area.

I will be posting plenty more photos and notes on our progress, the pool should be sprayed by next weekend, things are still progressing well given the very early setbacks. Keep an eye out for updates, or you can subscribe to updated feeds via subscibing to posts using atom, at the LHS very bottom of the page.