Howard County Maryland Home to New Pool

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Award-winning landscape design-build firm, Botanical Decorators is at it again, this time in Howard County, Maryland. Botanical is building a pool, complete with its signature landscaping, of course, that will turn the home’s backyard into a virtual oasis of recreation. Watch as this new backyard space takes shape over the coming weeks.

This pool will be constructed using Gunite, the most popular design fabrication material in much of the United States. To build one of these pools, the construction crew digs a hole, puts the plumbing in place and assembles a framework grid with 3/8-inch steel reinforcing rods (rebar). The rebar rods are spaced about 10 inches apart, and secured together with wire. When the grid is in place, the crew sprays a heavy coating of gunite, a mixture of cement and sand, around the rebar. The sprayer unit combines dry gunite mix with water just before spraying — this produces the wet concrete material. The crew trowels the gunite smooth and lets it sit for a week or so before applying a smooth finish to the rough surface. The most popular finish is called plaster (actually a mixture of cement and marble sand), but a lot of people finish their pools with special concrete paint. Gunite pools can also have tile, exposed aggregate or even fiberglass finishes. Gunite pools (and their cousins, shotcrete pools) are highly durable, and they can be built in any shape or size. (Source: Howstuffworks.com)

Botanical Decorators was featured in Dean & Derek’s popular DIY Network’s show, Indoors Out, earlier this year in the Washington DC area.