Unilock Patio, Wall, and FiberGlass Pool Project (lots of pics)

Here's the scenario. last fall/winter a ground hog tunneled under our old pool and chewed a hole in the liner, it drained, and collapsed during the winter. Here's a pic of the start of the demolition.

 

the next step was to excavate the site to the dimensions of the new pool (11' longer). This was quite a task because of all the rain we had this spring. We were very close to just filling in the hole and throwing the hole project away. We had continual collapses and mudslides. A fiberglass pool just needs a firm base, so we were able to make a gravel pit and keep the water level down low enough to allow the install. typical liner pools would have NEVER been able to install in this hole this spring, it was just too wet. here's the hole prepped with gravel in the bottom awaiting the pool.

Edit, you can see all the mud we excavated (this side of the pool) that morning from the night's mudslide.

 

the pool came from the factory in jersey on an oversize load trailer. the high side is over traffic and the low side was only about 8" off the ground. As people drove by this thing in our drive they had a "WTF! is that?!" look on their faces, it looked like something out of an amusement park to me.

 

this picture is after we rolled it off the trailer and into teh grass, it's now in position to be spun around. (note, the deep end is in the wrong end for the hole)

 

here its in the hole, centered, and plumbed with flexible hoses. we're ready for backfilling 17 yd's worth of 3/8" pea gravel as we similtaniously fill the pool with water.

 

here we're filling the pool with listerine (this is what i told my gullible neighbor who asked why the water was blue).

We were unable to use a tanker truck for filling because of the soggy base, we filled the pool using the sunk pump under all the gravel! all in all we spread the filling over 9 days (rain delay and couldn't get more fill in) and pumped 20,000 gallons of water from the hole into the pool!

 

after it dried out, we got more fill in and graded the area smooth with a L35 w/ a york rake.

we used 60 yd's of fill total for back filling and grading.

 

we got a delivery of item #4 in for the patio base, We used a Komatsu dozer with a 6way blade to spread it. We also used a lazer level.

You can see we also poured concrete for the ladder bases and the diving board. We used a tamper to finalize teh grading process.

We also used stakes and strings to grade the area, these were set using a rotating lazer level.

 

oops, forgot one here, here is the next level of fill we used and tamped before placing the item #4 in the previous pic.

 

after the item #4 we used 1" of stone dust to set the pavers on. We used 20' lengths of 1" PVC to screed.

Note how we made the mistake of choosing a 3 brick pattern. This was the major time consumption during the paver install. Even now after i've laid about 700 sqft of the pattern i still don't know it, and i have to constantly double check my progress.