Scraping (& Tile #1)

It was pretty cool Monday afternoon, being comfortable with the new spa location, walking around the outline of the pool and imagining how it would look. It turns out that after moving the spa, my swim lane has grown to about 38' long, which is even better.

I had dug around on Monday and salvaged the three sprinkler valves that were buried in the middle of the "pool", but I was warned that the scraper guy would be taking off the sod and topsoil down 4 inches first thing Tuesday morning.

So I got the kids off to school at 7am Tuesday and started digging up all my gingers, hibiscus, and a mini banana plant to relocate. We had moved the tortoise pen the previous weekend, but didn't get around to moving all the wood from the old oak tree that we took down last fall. I got up most of the stepping stones that led down to the dock, moved the hose to another side of the house, and disassembled the wood barriers around the garden bed on the side of the lanai. Whew. Still had to shower and change to get to my appointment with the designer (pool builder's wife) to pick out tile.

The pool builder (PB) and scraper showed up and I told them where to put the wood and that my husband had marked out where the cistern will be buried between the other tiebacks (that's the corner of it painted in the front left of the picture). He's picked out the cistern that we have to drive 1 1/2 hours away to pick up (shipping is much wor$e) and printed out the specs for the PB. PB is checking on code and permitting for us, but our plan is just to collect rainwater for washing the boats - it won't be plumbed into the house or connect with potable water anywhere. The current plan is to have the excavator dig the hole for us while he's there, because it has to be something like 5 feet down.

Anyway, I ended up at my appointment late ("Your husband's fault!") but still spent two hours looking at options. This is really hard. I told the designer about the look that I'm after. No lagoon. No natural, beach, sand, stone, rock, Roman, Tuscan, Mediterranean, etc. Fake Windex Blue is my idea of a pool. (It may be because we already have a real waterway in our backyard that I don't feel the need to recreate a fake one.)
* Pebbletec or Pebblesheen? Which one will give me the bluest blue? PebbleTec Blue Lagoon or PebbleSheen Aqua Blue? Hubby likes the pebbly look of the Tec, but I think the Sheen will be bluer. Designer says the Sheen often doesn't come out as even during the acid wash, since the stones are smaller. Something like this that makes sense to me.
* Artistic Pavers Shellock Tan or Buff? Is Buff too peachy? Ivory is definitely too white and will be too bright. Probably Tan. Shellock is our big splurge because I saw it at one of the showrooms and fell in love. I'm just really tired of concrete pavers and this is the perfect solution for the hot sun. But it's really expensive.

* Myriad options for waterline tile. I don't want it to look like stone, so that eliminates a lot of them. Another friend calls me during the appointment to advise me to get 6" tile. The grout lines for smaller tiles or mosaics will show even the slightest amount if the pool is not perfectly level and I've seen this, so I agree. I'm going to have to look through the Luv Tile and MasterTile catalogs later, although the tile I like the best so far (Earthview Blue) doesn't look anything like the picture in the catalog (it's the 3 samples to the right of the Pebble samples).
* I'm going to want step markers and something to mark the swim lane. It's getting so long and deep that I will get lost without something along the bottom, since I don't swim very straight. Love the Lightstreams Shell Beach glass tiles, but they're probably more expensive than I'm willing to pay at this point. Just some nice iridescent 1" glass tiles should work.

This is going to take a lot more research and soul searching before I can decide and the designer has to get a few more samples for me. Ugh.

This is what my backyard looked like at the end of the day: