DIY dad builds dream pool in garden thanks to YouTube tutorials

Expressing that he’s “dreamt of having a pool” and “even earmarked a little patch to hopefully build it on one day,” Dodman dove right into his new DIY project.

“As soon as I’d watched [YouTube video] I rang up and hired a digger. I’d never driven a digger before, so I’d dug this massive hole and then there was no going back.”

‘A blessing’

Though there was no going back he did hit a huge obstacle.

Dodman started building the pool in January 2020 “but then Covid hit, and [he] couldn’t get any materials for ages.”

Stuck with a giant hole in his yard, Dodman explains he had to get creative.

Describing the pandemic closures as “a bit of a blessing,” the DIY dad “started buying the things [he] needed from Facebook Marketplace which was a lot cheaper.”

‘Zero experience’

Dodman shows his 247,000 TikTok followers the 12 stages he followed to build “a fully functioning swimming pool in [his] backyard with zero experience.”

Each clip details various steps of the project, like learning to operate the digger, plumbing, laying bricks to tiling and lastly diving into his new blue pool.

And he did it for less than £10,000 ($12,871 US).

Speaking of his dream build, Dodman says, “In general, the hardest thing to learn from a DIY perspective was plumbing – that’s quite annoying. If you do it wrong, you get drips and stuff.” He continues, “But it’s not as hard as I thought it was going to be, it really is kind of like water LEGO.”

Since the pool was completed, Dodman added a garden cabin, a pergola with a large projection screen to watch games while soaking in the hot tub, a barbeque house and a playhouse for his two children.