What to Settle Before You Build a Pool

Start with how you will actually use it

Not how you imagine using it. How you will use it, given your life as it currently is.

Lap swimming, small children, entertaining and quiet soaking produce four genuinely different pools, and a pool that tries to be all four does none of them well. The useful exercise is to rank them rather than list them. If lap swimming is genuinely first, that fixes the length and everything else works around it. If it is fourth, do not buy a pool shaped by it.

Be honest about the children question in particular. A pool built around a five-year-old is a different pool from one built around a fifteen-year-old, and the five-year-old becomes the fifteen-year-old faster than the pool wears out. A shallow shelf and a gentle entry serve both. A four-foot-deep play pool serves only one.

And be honest about entertaining. If the real use is six adults around a table with the pool as the backdrop, then deck, shade, lighting and sound matter more than the water does, and the budget should reflect that.

The questions worth answering first

1. What is the pool for? Rank swimming, children, entertaining and soaking. Do not tie.
2. Where will you sit? Find the spot in the yard that has afternoon sun and shelter from the wind. That is where the deck goes, and the pool arranges itself around it.
3. What will you look at? From the kitchen window, from the sofa, from the table. The pool is seen far more than it is swum in.
4. How does a machine get in? Walk the access route. Measure the narrowest gate. This is the largest unknown in most estimates.
5. What is already in the ground? Sewer lateral, gas, water, septic, leach field, irrigation, an old slab. Find out before you site anything.
6. What are you prepared to maintain? Every feature has an upkeep consequence. Decide what you will actually look after.
7. What will it cost to run? Heating, electricity, chemicals and service. On this coast, heating is the big one and a cover is the answer.
8. What does your jurisdiction require? Permits, design review, coastal, trees, geotechnical. This drives the schedule more than construction does.
9. What is the safety plan? California requires two of seven listed drowning-prevention features on a permitted pool. A fence line changes the deck layout, so decide early.
10. What is the real budget? Including decking, landscape repair, furniture and the first year of running costs — not just the pool.

The two mistakes that are hard to undo

The first is siting. A pool in the wrong place in the yard cannot be moved, and the most common version of this is putting the pool where there is room rather than where the sun is. Mark the outline on the ground, leave it a week, and sit in the spot where the loungers would go at five in the afternoon. If it is in shade or in the wind, move the pool, not the loungers.

The second is under-specifying the invisible parts. Pipe size, the number of returns, the filter area, conduit for future lighting, a stubbed line for a water feature you have not committed to. All of it is cheap while the trench is open and expensive or impossible afterwards. If you are going to economise, economise on something you can change later.

Planning questions

Related reading

• What drives the costWhere the money goes
• Questions to ask any pool builderBefore you sign
• Pool designHow we work a site
• Features, and when to decide eachBuilt in or bolted on
• Permits in Monterey CountyThe approval path
• How long a build takesRealistic scheduling