Patio Prep

 Even with the delay on the boulders for the retaining wall, progress continues in other places.  Tango Pools came back to prep the front area of the pool for installation of the paver patio.  The prep will basically just involve digging down to a certain depth to introduce space for a base rock that will be compressed and provide a stable base for the pavers to sit on.  Before that can be completed, any thing that wants to run anywhere under the pavers need to be installed.  This includes irrigation lines for the planting beds, and low voltage wiring for landscape lighting.  I don't think all the pavers can be installed before the boulder wall is created since heavy machines need to get to the back side of the pool, but maybe the section of the patio near the deep end can be laid.

 

 

   Here's a shot of the excavation on the front of the pool, where the patio pavers will be laid.  There will be a large enough area for a round table and chairs, but there will also be a planting bed in the concave section of the pool.  They left a little pile of native soil where the planting bed will be, but we'll need to amend the very sandy soil with some good bed soil.

They installed two 1" irrigation pipes to the center planting bed.  I would imagine that one of them is slated to act as a conduit for electrical and the other is for actual irrigation.  There's a main trunk that runs somewhere in the area that the irrigation installers will be able to tap into.  As far as I can remember, there's one trunk for the rear yard lawn irrigation and one that runs the side of the yard for bed plantings.  There are still a few heads connected to the rear lawn irrigation that I would like to keep for just watering the grass.  There might need to be additional sprinkler heads installed to spray the grass away from the pool area.  Hopefully all the pool irrigation beds will be tapped into the side bed irrigation trunk.

   The excavator is sitting on the section of the pool patio that was originally slated to drop down in elevation for a little firepit sitting area.  We've since decided to no drop down in elevation, but will keep the same level as the rest of the patio, since it would have been more difficult to make a double bullnosed coping stone.  It would have been a nice feature but not a game breaker.  I think this area still needs to be excavated for the paver stones, and I'm also expecting irrigation and low voltage wires to run in this area.

   Here's another area where more excavation is needed for the paver install.  The swim out steps were shifted towards the skimmer in the original design, but needed to be moved towards the middle due to the location of trees.  Regardless, there's a paver path that wraps around this side of the pool to the swim out steps.  It will reduce the size of the planting bed on the back side of the pool, but that bed wasn't designed for any particular planting arrangement, just some low ground cover.

   Base rock is being delivered and spread tomorrow but I don't think it will look that different since the ground was pretty level to begin with.  Boulders will be delivered Monday and will be a bit of a circus, but progress is moving forward quickly.  I really have to hand it to the workers of Tango Pools.  They're here every morning at 7:30 and begin working at 8 and pull a full day.  I don't think we've had such great people installing at the house.