A friend recently had the paving around their pool done. I thought it might be helpful to put up their experience and their advice…
Phone around for a few quotes. Be sure to have the exact square meterage that you will require. A lot of places won’t do work for less than 40 m2.
Find someone reputable with at least a five year guarantee (10 is better).
Most people will insist on coming out to measure the area themselves because they have to take any decks or steps that you might have around the pool into account. They might give you a quote, but will probably still come out and measure the area anyway.
Be sure that you have about an hour and a half available when they do come to give the quote, because they go through all the options and all the different types of bricks even though you might know exactly what you want.
Once you have accepted the quote and payed the deposit (usually 50%) then they will tell you their available time slot that they will be able to come allow 3 to 4 weeks for this (before they start work on the area).
They will probably drop the bricks off on your pavement about a week before they start working (warning: If this causes obstruction for visibility from the road, you might be fined.)
They will probably phone you and tell you that they are going to start working on your area around the same time that they drop the bricks off (allow 1 or 2 days just because they can)
When they do start working, they will probably take longer to finish off than originally quoted (allow 1 or 2 days).
If you are not there to supervise them, you can be guaranteed that a lot of cement, bricks and rubble will land in your pool, causing you endless problems trying to clean up the mess in your filter etc. etc… This happened to me, so I speak from experience.
Once they are complete, perform a full check on the work that they have done, from all angles. Once you are satisfied, then give them the final payment.
You can be sure to notice some faults a day or two after you have made the final payment, such as the paved area not being level, some bricks placed higher than others in certain areas and so forth. Also, I have the fortunate experience to have to call them and complain about grass starting to grow between the bricks due to them not filling the edges properly. Needless to say, two more phone calls had to be made before they came out to fix the problem, and then they didn’t use the exact same colour of cement as they did originally.
Win some, lose some I say
So, let me know if you have any tips or ideas, or even your hellish experience of when you got your pool area paved.