Concrete pool shell completed

Our pool people built framework out of wood panels and some sort of foam to pour the concrete into. After the concrete was poured they took the frame away so now we have grey, rectangle hole with some edging around it plus a vertical section at the far side for the waterfall feature wall. Mr Sasanqua had to go to the site everyday for the first 10 days to water the concrete so that it won't dry too quickly and crack.

Pool excavation done and formwork started

Swimming pool excavation is done, and we had to hire fencing to secure the pool site (it's a requirement). It's about $80 per month for hire, and we need to have this in place until we finish our pool and install our frameless glass fence. 

Pool Excavation

A digger for our pool came in to dig the huge hole in the ground.
We have hired a separate pool company to do our pool, and they are project managed by our landscape people. Doing the pool at the same time as our new house is stretching our budget a bit, but we rationalised that if we don't do the pool now and leave it after the house is built, there will be quite a bit of extra cost associated with the difficult access to the pool site in the future. If we really can't stretch our budget to have our dream luxury pool finished by the time our house is done, we will just leave the hole in the ground as it is and work on it later as our finances allow.

Anyway, we have a huge hole in our back yard!

Council Notification period ended

It's been about a month since all our documents were submitted to the council. The notification period has ended now so if there are not many complaints or concerns submitted by our neighbours, hopefully the council will start working on our DA and get ours approved fairly quickly.

Our pool DA went in a few days after the main house DA, so that one should be out of notification period now too.

Swimming pool

Mr Sasanqua wanted a swimming pool in the back garden ever since we started talking about rebuilding the house. Our landscape designer recommended a few pool companies to give us a quote on the pool and we had a meeting with one of them. Pools are expensive. We are considering the option at this stage (until we can afford it in a couple of years' time) of only having a hole for the pool dug by a big digger when the old house is demolished and while site access is easy. This is because accessing the back garden after the new house is built will be hard. If they need to use a very small excavation equipment that can go through a 90cm gap on the side of the house, and wheelbarrow the dirt and sandstone out, the additional cost would be ridiculous (roughly $20,000 just for hard access). We can fence off the dug hole, and finish the pool when we can afford it.

We would like to have for our pool: glass fence, feature rock wall at the far side, water feature down the rock wall, underwater lights, solar/gas heated water, integration into back garden landscaping. We will see how many out of this list we can afford.

We need to submit DA for the pool soon now that the house DA has gone in to council, because once DA approval for house comes through the demolition and building starts fairly quickly and we don't want to miss the window of site access for digging the pool.

Council submission

We heard from our contract coordinator that they have couriered documents to our council yesterday so things are starting to move!

Front of the house

Back of the house