Fort Collins Concrete Pools

The first thing we look at on a pool job isn't the design. It's the property. A concrete shell is a structure that has to be excavated, reinforced, shot or cast, and cured, and every one of those steps happens inside whatever room your lot is willing to give up. Fort Collins hands us wildly different lots depending on where you are in town, and that difference drives more of the build than the shape you picked off a rendering.

Older properties around Old Town come with mature trees, narrow side yards, alleys instead of driveways, and utilities that were placed before anyone drew a plan you could look up. Newer builds in Rigden Farm and The Landing give us clean access and known utility locations, but tighter setbacks, less yard, and an HOA that wants to see the plan. Larger lots out toward Fossil Creek and Registry Ridge trade all of that for real room to work. Same pool, three very different jobs.

Reading a property before anyone draws a pool

Excavation makes spoil, and spoil has to go somewhere. A residential pool hole produces a serious volume of dirt, and on a lot with a single narrow gate that means haul-off by the truckload, which is a real line on the estimate. On an open lot we can often regrade some of it on site and the whole equation changes.

Access decides equipment. If a machine can reach the hole, the dig is straightforward. If it can't, somebody is either removing fence sections or bringing in smaller equipment and taking longer. Shotcrete helps here, because the pump line reaches places a concrete truck's chute will never see. That's part of why we spray shells instead of forming them.

Then the invisible stuff. Where the sewer lateral runs, where the gas comes in, what the water table does in a wet spring, and what the soil is like eight feet down. Our structural engineer is in-house, so what comes back from the dig goes straight into the steel schedule instead of into a two-week wait on an outside consultant.

What each kind of Fort Collins property gives a pool crew

Sprayed shell or cast in forms

Both put structural concrete in the ground and both work. They just fit different situations. Shotcrete is placed pneumatically against the excavated earth and the steel cage, so the dirt itself acts as the outside form. That means no formwork to build and strip, compound curves and free shapes are easy, and the whole shell goes in during a single shoot day. For a residential pool on a Colorado lot, it's what we reach for nearly every time.

Cast-in-place has its place on simple rectangles, on jobs where a shotcrete crew and pump can't reach the hole, or where a design calls for architectural wall faces that want to be formed. You get very predictable surfaces. You also get forms on both faces, more time in the hole, and cold joints in places a sprayed shell wouldn't have them.

Whichever way it goes in, the steel is engineered rather than assumed, the shell is cured with water for days rather than left to dry in the wind, and the backfill around it gets placed and compacted properly. That ring of disturbed soil is what your deck later has to bridge, and dumping it back loose is how a two-year-old deck ends up cracked at the coping.

What our concrete scope on a pool covers

• Excavation to the engineered profile, with spoil hauled or placed by agreement
• Steel cage tied to the engineer's schedule, supported off the subgrade rather than laid on it
• Coordination windows for plumbing, electrical, and any hydraulic penetrations before concrete
• Shell placed by an experienced nozzle crew, cut and screeded to the design thickness
• Wet curing for the full week after placement, not a spray-and-walk-away
• Backfill placed in compacted lifts around the shell, since the deck has to sit on it
• Written sequencing so you know which trade is coming and roughly when