DIY dad turned garden into tropical paradise using social media.

A YouTube video of a woman creating a pool in her yard inspired the father of two to do it.

Alex Dodman, who had “zero experience,” leased a little digger to “give it a go” and started scooping soil from his yard for the pool that day. Discover how this man completed his dream project on a budget!Alex Doman, an Essex ambulance worker, moved into a derelict home with his partner Sarah and their two daughters Allie and Eddie in 2018.

Social media led 38-year-old Dodman to take down the fixer-upper to build his ideal home for his family.Renos began with a YouTube video of a tradesperson installing a wall stud.

Dodman, a National Health Service employee, then added a gym in the backyard, a family-sized cinema, and a fold-down bed in his stylish home office.

He discovered the £250,000 (approximately $322,000 US) house had risen in value to £525,000 ($675,000 US).

“We had the house valued and were told it was now worth £525,000, which I put down to the work I’ve done,” Doman tells The Sun in February 2022.

The father was ready for his next project after realizing he was a DIY pro.

Dive in
On his lunch break, Dodman “watched a YouTube video of a woman in Holland who built her own pool in her garden.”

Having “dreamt of having a pool” and “even earmarked a little patch to hopefully build it on one day,” Dodman began his new DIY project.

“After watching the YouTube video, I called a digger. I’d never operated a digger before, so I dug this huge hole and couldn’t go back.”

‘A boon’
Though there was no turning back, he met a major challenge.

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

Dodman had to get inventive with a huge yard hole.

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

‘Zero experience’
Dodman explains to his 247,000 TikTok followers how he built “a fully functioning swimming pool in [his] backyard with zero experience.”

The clips cover everything from using the excavator to plumbing, laying bricks, tiling, and jumping into his gorgeous blue pool.

He achieved it for under £10,000.

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

Dodman added a garden lodge, pergola with a large projection screen to watch games in the hot tub, barbecue house, and playhouse for his two children after the pool was finished.

Despite not being “confident in DIY,” the remodeling hobbyist learnt by “just by giving it a go.”

“I’ve made mistakes and things don’t always go as planned, but trying is best.” Dodman credits YouTube for his accomplishment, saying, “I learned almost everything from YouTube, and there are a lot of builders’ forums online where you can find help on loads of projects, any problem you come across, it’s likely someone else has in the past and has written about it online.”

While Dodman’s endeavors are admirable, we don’t encourage digging huge garden holes.

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