I Bought a House With a Pool, and Wow, Was I in Over My Head!

We'll just clean this up in a week, right?
We’ll just clean this up in a week, right?Sally Herigstad

I live in a house with a gorgeous in-ground pool. When my husband and I bought the property in 2012, I swooned over visions of pool parties filled with floaties and endless summer fun.

It’s a good thing I didn’t start sending out those pool party invitations too soon. Because first, we had to figure out how to repair and maintain a swimming pool, which is no small task. Here are a few things I learned about what it takes to have a home with a pool.

Lesson No. 1: Renovating a run-down pool will drain your bank account dry

The home we’d purchased was a distressed property near Seattle that had been empty for years. Thieves had stolen anything they could, including equipment and wiring. My neighbor talked about chasing off groups of teenagers who trespassed onto the empty property and sat around the pool, throwing rocks and bottles into the water. By the time we’d bought the place, the pool water wasn’t just green. It was a menacing green, a black, lumpy morass.

We were about to discover just how expensive and harrowing pool repair can get.

For one, the pool equipment needed to be replaced. A new, energy-efficient heat pump cost $4,500. We bought a pool-cleaning robot for about $800. Just to get the pool running, we spent about $10,000.

It wasn’t just money, either. Because draining a fiberglass pool can cause the shell to shift, we had to actually clean the existing water in the pool rather than draining it. So we spent weeks dragging rubbish and rotting debris out of the murky depths. We evicted hundreds of croaking frogs and salamanders. We cleaned out gallons of pine needle sludge before the pool was even clean enough to start using the pool robot.

The day we could see the bottom of the pool was a long-awaited victory.

Lesson No. 2: Once it’s up and running, swimming pools rock!

And yet: Once all the repairs were done, our first pool party had me hooked! Friends came, and friends of friends. They brought food, and babies, and laughter! It’s a good thing I live in the country, because the shrieking and carrying on would have been heard for blocks away in the city.

I discovered why playing in a home pool is much better than going to a lake or a public pool. I control the temperature, for one thing. (I think 86 degrees is about right.) I test the water myself, so I know the chemicals are all just so. We follow our own rules, with all the floaty toys and basketball games we want.

Lesson No. 3: Even when your pool is fixed, maintenance costs a pretty penny

I’ll admit that my expectations of pool ownership were different from the reality. I had thought that once it was fixed up, we could add a few chemicals and run the pump filters every so often, and spend long, lazy summers lounging by the pool.

First, we live in the Pacific Northwest. So which long, lazy summers? You don’t know how short our summers are until you’re scanning the weather report, looking for enough sunshine to open the pool. I’m lucky if my pool doesn’t look more like this:

Second, pools require a lot of maintenance, and inevitably, repairs. Sometimes we say we should just throw cash in the water, for all the chemicals we buy and dump in the pool. Last year, the pipes sprang a leak, and the summer was half over before it was working again. We spend a significant portion of every summer working on our pool. Last summer, we spent about $500 on repairs, plus another $200 on chemicals.

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