Lazy Day Pools

Very trustworthy company. Chris is very knowledgeable. We are very happy with the finished product.

I will first say that the owner, Chris Ward, is generally a nice guy, but he completely botched our pool and when confronted with the issues, his way of responding is to get defensive, retreat and then blame the customer. We’ve taken our case to the Better Business Bureau as well.
I would NOT recommend you hire him to build your pool, and I would encourage you to email us here for more details and pictures. If you do hire Chris, you must make sure you are present EVERY DAY the work is being done, and hope for no disagreements. Also, don’t let him talk you into a cartridge filter: you will spend more money buying clean cartridges and they cost more to clean than sand, and Chris knows this.
This spring, we spent a grand finally replacing our cartidge filter with a sand filter.
The following is an incomplete list.
1. I came home to find that the crew had dug the hole for the pool in the –wrong place-​. It was way too close to the home. Not where we had marked or agreed. We were able to «move» the pool four feet in the right direction before the concrete was poured.
2. The contractor Chris hired to install the light switch put it smack dab in the middle of our lawn without any discussion, versus trying to hide the annoying fixture in bushes a few feet away. Somehow this was our fault. We had to pay the guy another 150 dollars to move it to a safer and less conspicuous place.
3. Chris filled the pool before installing the 500 watt light. The light sits a few feet into the water. I called to warn him as they were filling the pool with water. In the end, he had to return in freezing weather, in his swimsuit, to install the light.
4. The crew left ungalvanized nails just below the surface of the concrete decking of the pool. Within weeks, the salt from the pool water creeped into the concrete and rusted the nails, leaving rust stains on the concrete lip surrounding our brand new pool. Chris, the company’s owner, had to come out again, in the cold, to dig into the concrete with a tool, remove the rusted nails, and then use a concrete patch kit to fill in the holes. The color of the patch does not match the original concrete.
5. By far, our biggest issue was this: the pool plaster. First, the color was wrong. Second, Lazy Day Pools and Spa made a mistake installing it, and later had to DRAIN the entire pool to re-​do the acid wash. We had what’s called «scale,» and Chris Ward avoided my concerns for weeks until the chalky build up at the bottom of our pool looked like someone had poured in bags of white sand. When he finally agreed that there was a problem, it was now just before Christmas and we were out of state. We did not want them doing any work without either of us there. Chris now was strongly arguing that he would not honor our warranty if he had to wait until we returned home the following week. In the end, Chris’s fix (to drain the pool and re-​acid-​wash the pool), left the bottom of our new pool discolored and patchy. We argued for new plaster, and Chris refused. We tried to hire an independent specialist to come out and give his assesment, but the specialist refused to accept our business and later confessed he had a relationship with Chris Ward and Lazy Day Pools.
6. Many of the photos featured on Lazy Day’s website are NOT pools built by the company. This was confirmed to us by the serviceman Lazy Day sent to clean our pool every week. There are palm trees in some of the best photos.
7. Our pool’s pump and plumbing were not adequate for the pool size and run, and we had to spend thousands replacing both. The pump died this past spring.