Patio Renovation

Ever since I closed on my house in April 2020, the back patio always bugged me. I paid full price for the house because of how much i loved it! I pretty much let the seller, who was also my landlord and friend, get away with whatever they wanted without trying to get money off of the sale or anything like that. But I spent all of my savings on this small house on a double lot in the middle of a city with absolutely no private outdoor living space. I have far more land outside than inside and everyone saw everything I was doing. The back patio was the only outdoor space that made sense to fence in completely with a privacy fence. This past summer I finally pulled the trigger on a large project that I have been considering and thinking about for over 2 years and tore all the old and built something new!

I struggled for a while to find the perfect spot for a stock tank pool, which was a vision of mine since before I owned any property at all. I always thought this space was too small for a pool but it ended up being perfect after i measured the area for the permit drawings. The final product differed a bit from the original drawings, but for reference here is the original model I drafted up with Sketch Up.

For the most part, I built this alone. But, I met a guy in the alley that was desperate for any work or money opportunity. He approached me while demoing the patio. I had him remove the old concrete and help me pour the new concrete. I'm very busy and was working most of the time while he was preparing the patio so I was pretty uninvolved in the prep.. which was a mistake. The patio is on a large retaining wall structure that is at a pretty serve slope. He did not use forms to for the new pad, just the old walls, so the new patio ended up being pretty sloped after we were finished. A little too sloped to put a deck a build a pool on. .

I will more than likely have a whole blog post about the pool itself, probably several. I have a 3 part series on my Tiktok and instagram page showing the whole process of the build with the deck and pool. I plan on making a more in depth youtube video showing the process with more detail, but I was tired of making excuses of putting off the start of this blog and my habits of blogging, so here were are without a more in depth youtube video as of right now.

3 Part TikTok Series

As a Fence contractor, I bid out and build jobs like this as a career. I would have charged a client about $15,000 for the work I did on my back patio. The materials cost me about $7,000 including the pool. If you are a young home owner, I highly recommend gaining some building skills. I have attached a list of tools below that I found completely necessary to make this renovation happen.