Building an Entertaining Area around the Swimming Pool.

The swimming pool at Elvira's Paradise is a work of art. It is a concrete pool carved to look like the natural rocks that it is set amongst. The paving of the swimming pool area at Elvira's Paradise has been completed. Over 120sqm of pavers have been used in the job, but I am very pleased with the end result. It makes the pool look much bigger than it looked before we paved.

The next job is the construction of a patio up on the hill beside the pool. I can picture myself sitting up there looking over the pool and gardens sipping on a pina colada, when I have a spare moment. It's nice to dream, I don't think that I will ever have a spare moment. When you are in the middle of a development such as the one that we are trying to achieve, on the budget with which we are working, one doesn't have enough time in the day, or enough days in the week, to sit back and just appreciate what you have done, and the progress that you are making. In conjunction with the construction of the patio will be the placement of the pilons to attach a huge shade sail to shield the pool or part of it from the sun and then the pool fence, in the Northern Territory of Australia we don't have to have a fence around the swimming pool if it is on an acreage and for private use, but once our Tourist Park has a Certificate of Occupancy it will be compulsory for us to fence the pool. So we might as well fence as soon as we can.

We layed flat rocks into a bed of concrete under the Gazebo overlooking the pool. With so much rock on the property you wouldn't believe how hard it was to find rocks that I liked, after all, they will hopefully be there for a hundred years, so they had to be just right. It may not sound like we did very much over the week-end, but if you saw how much rain we got here in Katherine, you would be amazed that we got any concrete poured at all. Then you have to consider that we mixed the batches by hand as the mixer broke down as well. I am hoping that the patio itself will be finished soon, and then we are going to plant some plants amongst the rocks between the patio and the pool. This will involve carrying hundreds of buckets of soil up the footpath and tipping them onto the rocks, I haven't decided if I want green foliage or flowers or a mixture of both. After that I hope that we will start on the pool fence.

We have ordered the steel for the cabins and ablutions/entertainment area. I hope that the tourists and visitors to our Tourist Park will enjoy these facilities. Everything is full steam ahead. The weather here in Katherine in the Northern Territory has been a typical Wet Season for us, it has rained every day for the past 2 weeks, so the gardens are looking good and the lawns are nice and green but lots of weeds have grown and we wont be able to poison them until it looks like the sun will shine for 6 hours or more, no point in wasting the money for the glysophate if the rain is going to wash it away.