Jim Chandler Pools

We went through a very careful process of choosing a pool contractor, and from the get-​go, Jim was our man. Some of the local companies didn’t return calls, or didn’t show up. We considered Premier and Geremia, but Jim’s references were impeccable, and the others were mixed. Turns out that Jim is an amazing contractor, on top of every detail, creative and stylish in his design, and utilizes vendors that do a good job, or else redo it as need be!
However, Jim is not the cheapest game in town for sure, but after he presented us with our budget, he worked with us to save us about 5k in a number of ways: chlorine instead of salt water pool, regular pool lights instead of color LED ones, cutting out some of the other bells and whistles, and we ended up buying our own Polaris vacuum etc. for a few hundred dollars of savings.
Our pool is very large, and we had a ground water issue to deal with, but six months after the job was finished, we are very happy with it. Jim facilitated the HOA and city permit process, and we had no big headaches along the way at all, and no damage to the property of the street in front (the vendors took extra care to do some extra ramping to try and prevent additional driveway and concrete cracking and that helped a lot, and saved us extra money to deal with replacing it.)
If you are thinking of building a pool, here are a few tips: what you may not know is that you need to be around to continually spray the plaster multiple times throughout the day to help it cure, and to sweep out the pool (walls and steps and bottom) a lot after it is newly filled. Ours was big, so this was a ton of work! We also did have to get the hot tub re-​plastered with all the little fissures (crazing) in it, but they did what they needed to do and it is great now. When they are filling the pool and spa, you may also have to set your alarm clock to get up during the night to monitor/​turn off the water so it does not overfill — they have to do it immediately after finishing up the plaster, so the timing can be tricky if you are at work etc. The popular Lake Tahoe plaster color is very gray and attracts some algae in the hot tub, but does look very contemporary and helps heat up the pool.
If I was doing it again, the one big item I would try to do differently was to use a different landscape contractor. Jim has worked with the same contractor for many years, and that is definitely a plus. The quality of the work was very good too. However, we have worked with a local contractor for many years, and when we priced out the sod, fence, vegetable beds and other extras we had added into our plan, our guys was about ¹⁄₃ — ½ cheaper and does great work and has been in business for many years. We ended up just using Jim’s guy for the infrastructure of the irrigation system, grading, concrete and the like, and used our guy for the other items. We contracted our own landscaping, buying the plants ourselves and using our own small business, and thus saving thousands of dollars from the original bid.
Anyway, if you go with Jim, you’ll get a beautiful product, and in this case, we do think that you generally get what you pay for!