PROFESSIONAL POOLS

Buyer beware. Actually. Run. Run as fast as you can. Professional Pools is anything but professional. In fact, we’ve been referring to them as “Hobby Pools” for quite some time. They claimed that as a pair of Elk Grove firefighters on alternate schedules, they would be able to give us full-time coverage of the work as it was ongoing. They were rarely on-site during the work and did not do any quality control. My husband and I were forced to point out flaws to them via text at all stages and most issues were never corrected. Further, they’d claimed that no pool they’d ever built had taken more than 52 days. We broke ground on May 4th and didn’t have water in the pool until late September. The pool equipment did not work until 2 weeks after the pool was filled. The punch list was ignored. The Contractors State License Board called the work "minimum trade standard" (an opinion they got from the company that plastered our pool – hardly an independent professional) and refused to help. Are we just disgruntled buyers? Judge for yourself: 1) The hot tub was excavated 2 feet larger than planned. Turns out the hot tub was drawn to scale at 9 ft diameter while the dimension shown was 7 ft. And apparently excavators use a scale, not drawn dimensions. When asked about it, Hobby Pools stated that there must be a glitch in his drawing program. (aka Not my fault!) 2) We had talked specifically at bid time that we did not want the plumber to heat-bend any of the pipes. This thins the wall of the pipes and leads to premature failure/leakage. But after the plumber’s first day – the pipes had all been heat bent. When we called Hobby Pools to let them know (since they hadn’t been there), they claimed no knowledge of that conversation. They agreed to not heat-bend anymore pipes (they were half done at this point), but guess what – next day… all heat-bent pipes. 3) The tile guys admitted to having really screwed up the tile work. They said they were going to rip off the tile and start over. Instead, they re-attached many hundreds of tiles (less than a half inch square in size) by hand, often at odd skews. What did Hobby Pools say? "You're never going to notice that once there's water in the pool.” 4) We agreed to a bid price for the pool, hot tub, and a waterfall. When the waterfall guy arrived, Hobby Pools presented us with a bill for an additional $7,000. Hobby Pools claimed we knew they'd only included $3,000 in the bid for the waterfall because they didn't know how much it was going to cost and they'd only just then gotten the final price ($10,000). They said they wouldn't continue to work on the pool unless we paid the $7k. The waterfall guy attested that he had only given a price 2 days prior because when Hobby Pools was putting the bid together, they didn’t have dimensions or drawings to show him that he could bid off of. To add insult to injury, the waterfall leaks. They’ve applied 3 different colors of grout to various locations and have just given up. We’ve left the waterfall on low for 6 hours and the pool lost ¾ inch of water. Minimum trade standard? 5) Concrete work - there are stairs up to the hot tub. We noticed the day before the concrete pour that the step forms were not correct - they were sloping toward the pool. Any water that fell in those areas would run directly into the pool. We alerted Hobby Pools (again, not on-site). They said, "we got this". But nothing was fixed and the steps were poured at the wrong angle. We had to fight to get them to re-cast the steps. And then they wanted us to sign a change order to agree that the color might be different from the other concrete previously placed. Further, after replacing the stone tiles on the step faces, they didn’t re-grout the tiles. 6) The plans call for a rock retaining wall. They placed 3 large boulders (2.5 ft in diameter) on the ground next to the patio with 3 ft triangular open areas between them. No grout. Not even a solid surface of rock to which we can place drainage and backfill or plant. 7) We specifically told Hobby Pools we wanted Pebble Tech/Pebble Sheen on our pool. They wrote "pebble" on the contract. They asked us for the color we wanted when ground was broken. We emailed them a color from the Pebble Tech website. There was no response. When it was time to plaster (late September), they brought us a pamphlet for Stonescape - a far inferior product. They demanded extra payment to get Pebble Tech and said they hadn’t noticed that the color we’d chosen was a Pebble Tech color. They even went so far as to refuse to continue work unless we agreed to the extra cost ($5,000+). 8) Immediately after filling the pool, we noticed it was leaking. After 3 weeks of complaining to them, Hobby Pools came out with their dye test and “didn’t find anything”. We hired a leak detection company ourselves who found the leak immediately and applied a temporary repair. The permanent repair was never made.