My research started with the type of pool and my first thought was to go with the quick and easy option of a fibre glass hull pool. It is true that there are some really good shapes and sizes out there now, with one in particular that ticked most of our wish list, but this is where I ran into my first problem.
Unfortunately, my French is not good enough to hold a conversation on the phone, so back to my normal stomping ground of internet based research.
Maybe it was timing and maybe it was COVID-19, but trying to get pool companies in France to respond to online enquiries is pretty much impossible, which really narrowed down my field of options.
Given that myself and the children are all really good swimmers and love to jump and dive into a pool, we really wanted something with a diving pit. This was proving to be a little too hard, as the majority of the fiber glass pools that we came across were of a constant 1.5m depth.
My next thought process was to look at DIY options, which means that we could tick all of our wish list items. Given that I was going to be working from home for the foreseeable future, why not combine working from home (in France) with a bit of DIY in the evenings and weekends. I have done a lot of DIY in the past and consider myself fairly proficient, but this will be by far my biggest undertaking.
Through various contacts, I found a highly recommended earthworks contractor in our area and started to realise that I could save a lot by going down the DIY route, as he was about 25% of the price that a pool contractor would have charged for the same job. BTW – When I say savings, I do not really mean that, what I mean is do something even bigger, within the same budget.
With the earthworks part sorted and relatively confident of my abilities to create the slab, the next decision was on construction method for the walls. I had instinctively gone down the polystyrene insulated formworks (ICF) blocks as my first thought process.
However, after much research, I went off this idea for a number of reasons:
- you are limited to a liner as the finish of the pool
- their density is relatively low and I fear that they will not take ‘hits’ very well, especially with two very good swimmers practicing tumble turns all the time
- ICF blocks seem to be quite fragile when pouring the concrete in and are subject to ‘blowing’, which might be ok if you have a few people working on the job to keep an eye on things and fixing it, but this will largely by a one man job
Therefore, I came to my final design choice, concrete shuttering blocks (bloc a bancher / coffrage). They work in the same principle of polystyrene blocks, in that they are dry stacked in rows with steel reinforcing bars and then filled with concrete afterwards. However, they are much denser and therefore can stand up to more resistance in both construction and usage. They also offer far more choices of finish, such as liner, paint, or tiles.