I thought last Friday was busy

May 11th

So the previous Friday we had 2 bids appointments

Today we have 3.

First up Premier - Premier has come back with a second design and a new bid. This design is in blueprint form and is a much nicer free form with raised spa and waterfalls. This is all much closer to our original plan, just without the auto cover. The pool bid is roughly 67k. Also we have a bid from Jorge at 20 and we already know from the Patio cover guy they sent over that will be around 7. So all told we are looking at 104. Still pretty high, much more then we were imaging in the begging - but a number we were starting to understand was going to be in the neighborhood. we were not going to get this project done for 85 without making a lot of cutbacks. We do like the design and from the begging have liked Mark and Jorge - in a smaller investment we would probably have signed up right then and there. However with a project of this see, I felt it wouldn't be prudent at this juncture to make that decision and we wait for our next appointment.

Mike from Diablo Pools - this was one of my least favorite appointments. Like we said before we felt as though Mike would build a good pool and was very qualified he just didn't communicate very well and we felt like he only wanted to build the pool and have us handle the rest. He went over his numbers which I don't even remember because this was obviously not going to work. As he left we both felt bad - but we just knew this would never work

Diablo Disney - as we were preparing for Jeremy from Diablo Disney we realized we had pretty much decided on Premier - we liked their design, their bid installing everything was doable and we really like the people. The one thing Jeremy had going for him was we had really liked him the first time.

When Jeremy got here we remembered why we liked him so much. Jeremy is an old ranch hand, team roper, good all around guy. He had a lot of great suggestions and was open to anything we wanted to do. When he first pulled up his design - I had all but forget he was showing us a design with an auto cover because he had come before we had changed our plan. Well he started going over his design and it was gorgeous (I can't post it here because unlike Diablo he didn't email me a copy of it) For starters it was Enormous - easily the biggest pool of the ones we had seen so far - also the way the cover was done, the back wall, the waterfalls - all of it was very very nice. I was starting to wonder if we might not end up with an auto cover after all and then... the bid. 122K including the patio cover but not the full landscaping - this total project was going to be in the 130's

after he left - we talked about how much we liked his design, but by far the most expensive so far. we did consider for a minute having him submit another design but in discussing it we decided we don't want him to go to all the effort if in the end we still went with Premier. Plus he was the one guy that was going to use his own guys and not Jorge and were sold on Jorge at this point.

with that on May 11th, 5 weeks after our first appointment we called Premier.