Awesome! Thanks so much for voting everyone!
We are in our 2nd (and Final!) home in The Villages. Our home is a courtyard villa (CYV) , meaning that it has a 5' privacy wall surrounding the back yard. Our CYV is unique in that most of the CYV's here have no room for a pool - we have a corner lot with an oversized back yard. We made the mistake of putting up a 1,300 sq ft screened cage first - we have a community pool a block down the road and my wife thought we didn't need to build our 3rd pool. After a year, we really didn't like the restrictions for the community pool - no drinks, no toys allowed in the pool, no music played loud, etc.
It was hard to find a PB that would install a pool without demolishing the cage, but we eventually found 2. They removed 2 sections of screen (about 8' wide), and brought in a mini bobcat. First they had to break up the existing concrete, and all of it was removed by hand with wheelbarrows (of course, there was an upcharge of about $10K for the extra labor). The company, Premier Pools of Central Florida, did a fantastic job on the pool and didn't damage the cage or the canvas covering.
Once the pool was finished, I entered retirement and my lifelong dream of having my own tiki bar started to take form. I began brewing beer in 1998, and decided to move from bottling to kegging when I retired. I designed the entire bar on my computer, and then started working on it. The frame underneath is all steel, and all of the exterior is bamboo so it can handle the warm humid weather of Florida. I had a number of talavera tiles that I had purchased for a different project, but had never used. I used these for the bar surface and then poured bartop epoxy over the tiles to protect them. The faux roof is made of a PVC pipe frame with split bamboo screwed into it so it looks like a bamboo frame. It ended up taking me about 8 weeks of hard work - often 6-8 hours a day. My wife kept saying "I thought you retired!"
Over the years, friends that have enjoyed the bar have brought in various signs and decorations to add to the bar, so the ambience continues to grow!
It's now a little over 5 years later, the bar still looks great, and I'm about to put keg #150 on tap! We have a lot of neighbors that enjoy a cold beverage, and we have become known as the local brewery that no one else knows about!
Again, thanks everyone for looking at all of these pics and voting. All of the submissions have great features and great looking pools!
www.troublefreepool.com
Here are examples of previous winners. It's easy! What have you got to lose? You might receive a $50 discount code from TFtestkits.net.
