L-06.PS · Pools & Pool Decks
Pools, and everything that makes one usable: deck, coping, retaining, fence, grade and planting. Whether BDS is installing the pool or picking up where a pool builder left off, this is what turns the hole in the clay into a back yard.
A pool shell in the ground is not a back yard. It is an excavation with water in it, surrounded by disturbed clay, spoil that has to go somewhere, a grade that no longer works, and an equipment pad nobody wants to look at. The distance between that and something a family uses is the whole job.
This is the work BDS is built around, and every documented project in the current portfolio is a pool property. Two versions turn up. Either BDS installs the pool and everything around it, or a pool builder has set the shell and left, and the property needs someone to make the other ninety percent happen.
The second version is more common than people expect and it has its own difficulty: the deck has to be set to a shell somebody else placed, at a height and a fall that were fixed before anyone thought about where the water off the deck would go.
Grade correction around the shell comes first. Excavation spoil has to be dealt with, backfill around the structure has to be compacted properly so the deck edge does not settle later, and the surface has to be reshaped so water leaves the pool area instead of running back into it.
The deck is built as hardscape: full excavation, compacted aggregate base in lifts, screeded bedding, pavers set and cut to the shell. Coping is set to the pool edge, which is the detail everyone looks at and touches, so it gets cut rather than fudged.
Drainage is cut into the deck where the fall alone will not do it, and deck water is kept out of the pool.
Retaining goes in where the lot falls away from the pool level, which on a sloping Floyd County lot is most of them. The equipment pad gets screened. A code-compliant barrier fence goes up, racked to grade so the top line follows the land.
Then beds are cut and planted to soften the deck edge, and turf is laid to the hardscape so there is no strip of bare clay between the two.
Quoted as a project rather than by a unit, because the pieces are interdependent and pricing them separately hides how much of the budget is earthwork.
The lot does most of the driving. A flat lot with access needs less retaining, less hauling and less grade correction than a falling lot, and on a sloping site the wall that holds the pool terrace up can be a serious share of the total on its own.
Then deck area and complexity, how much of the spoil has to leave the property, whether rock appears in the excavation, and access for machinery. A back yard reachable only through a narrow side gate changes the method for every trade that follows.
Fence is required, not optional, and is a real line. So is the planting that keeps the finished deck from reading as a slab in a field.
The deck settles against the shell, because the backfill around the structure was never compacted in lifts. The gap that opens at the coping is the first thing anyone notices.
Water runs toward the pool instead of away, carrying grit into it after every storm and keeping the deck wet.
The equipment pad ends up in the sightline from the house, because nothing was planned for screening until everything else was already built.
And the common one on a builder-set shell: a beautiful pool surrounded by bare compacted clay for two seasons, because the deck, the retaining and the planting were never budgeted as part of the pool.
Where this work leads
Quoted by the project, line by line, after a site walk. Across 21 counties from the shop in Floyd County.