Liquid Dreams

On the few occasions I buy water at a convenience store, I don’t think twice about downing the bottle I just paid two dollars for. Maybe you pay more or maybe you pay less, but I’m guessing the price doesn’t make you hesitate either. Even so, you could’ve gotten the same sixteen ounces for free out of your kitchen tap. That kind of thinking danced in my head last week when I reviewed a contractor’s bid for a new swimming pool in our backyard. I mean, it’s basically a divot filled with water.  How much could it possibly cost?

Like fancy cars and country clubs, I’ve just been reminded a pool earns the label of “luxury item”.  It’s a something you may want but definitely a something you don’t need.  The cost is just one of the reasons people flock to public pools instead of having one of their own.  But even public pools aren’t free. Maintenance. Insurance. Labor (lifeguards). The water itself.  The list goes on and on; the same costs you’d have with your own pool.  Okay, maybe not the lifeguards (unless my wife has visions of Baywatch studs in our backyard) but add it all up and pools are expensive with a capital E.

The contractor was more than happy to stop by our house last week for a look.  He loved the proposed location: flat, unobstructed, and right behind the back porch.  Then we debated the dimensions.  My wife wanted a lap lane for exercise, but just how long should a lap lane be?  Forty feet? Fifty feet?  Something to host the next Olympic Games?  Eventually we settled on fifty.  Then we added a “sun shelf” at one end for the grandchildren and a small patio at the other for an umbrella table and chairs.

Here’s where I got annoyed and suspicious (take your pick).  The whole time we’re talking, the pool contractor is doing nothing else besides talking.  He’s not sketching, he’s not measuring or taking notes, and he has no examples of what we’re looking for.  He’s just talking and nodding his head.  He did manage to find time to tell us how he likes to take his boat to the Bahamas several times a year (!) And before I could wrap my head around that he shook my hand with a hearty “Okay Dave! I’ll get you a quote by next week!”.

Well, “next week” is this week and I’m staring at a single page with a single number.  $89,750 without any bells or whistles.  Go ahead and gasp the way I did, as if you’re underwater in your new pool and can’t breathe (heh).  A few of you – those who already have pools – are nodding your heads and saying, “Yep, sounds about right, Dave.”  But now all I’m thinking about is how I’m helping this guy make his mortgage payments on his boat.  The quote is suspiciously vague as well; not even broken down into labor and materials.  My pool does come with a net and brush, a session of “pool school”, and an underwater light (“whoo-hoo”).  I also get a credit for “no diving board”, even though it doesn’t say for how much.

This experience reminds me of our last house, and a contractor who gave us a bid on a very large all-seasons deck.  We talked briefly while he stood on our lawn, gazing over to where the deck would go.  Then he held up his hands as if framing a painting.  After a few moments of silence he turned to us and simply said, “$200,000”.  Seriously?  Not only can you instantly estimate the cost of our new deck, but the number comes out to exactly $200k?  So I asked this guy for a more detailed quote and he said, “Yeah, no.  I am an artist (he pronounced it “ar-teest“).  People pay good money for my work”.  Yeah, not these people pal.

Our community has a small pool, sized to somewhere between soaking and short laps.  Really short laps.  My wife will take two or three strokes before having to think about her flip move to head the other way.  She’ll burn more calories switching directions than she will the swimming itself.  But hey, at least we won’t have to worry about the maintenance and insurance (or the mortgage payments on someone else’s boat).  For now at least, our pool will remain a liquid dream.

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Author: Dave

Five hundred posts would suggest I have something to say… This blog was born from a desire to elevate the English language, highlighting eloquent words from days gone by. The stories I share are snippets of life itself, and each comes with a bonus: a dusted-off word I hope you’ll go on to use more often. Read “Deutschland-ish Improvements” to learn about my backyard European wish list. Try “Slush Fun” for the throwback years of the 7-Eleven convenience store. Or drink in "Iced Coffee" to discover the plight of the rural French cafe. On the lighter side, read "Late Night Racquet Sports" for my adventures with our latest moth invasion. As Walt Whitman said, “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Here then, my verse. Welcome to Life In A Word.

21 thoughts on “Liquid Dreams”

  1. You make a great case for why we belong to a recreation club around the block from us where the outdoor pool is big enough to hold swim meets and I use it most every day from Mother’s Day to Labor Day when I am in town. Sometimes I am the only one in the Pool and the lifeguard is wearing a parka!

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    1. I wish we had an “around the corner” option like that as well. It’s more like thirty minutes for us, but at least someone else would be paying the bills and doing the maintenance!

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  2. When I first moved to my retirement home, I asked around if anyone had swimming pools. Turns out that there are few in town as we only have weather warm enough to swim for about four months a year. I did find one person who had a pool in my new neighbourhood – an indoor pool that reportedly cost about a third the cost of the house. He refused to discuss the pool heating bill.

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    1. Here in the South, you have to cool your pool in the summer (on top of heating in the winter) to extend your swimming season beyond about four months. All that water treatment makes me see dollar signs… and not good ones at that.

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  3. Maintenance costs was one of the reasons we did not buy a house with a pool when we were house shopping in Arizona! The other reason was that we are only there in the winter and much of the time it really isn’t pool weather!

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    1. Seems like more trouble than it’s worth, especially here in the South where you have to cool the water in the summer. Our energy bills are high enough already! (BTW, your comments are coming in as “Anonymous”?)

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  4. I have developed the idea that owning a pool is much like owning a boat – except that you don’t have to move to sell your boat.

    My Mrs has brought up the idea of a pool a time or two, but with all the trees in our area, I would probably be cleaning the pool every other day to keep it usable. $80k would pay for a pretty good resort membership.

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    1. We have a big deciduous tree we don’t want to remove because it would provide some shade over the pool and patio. Would also provide a lot of leaves for me (or the pool guy) to clean up. Constant maintenance, sigh…

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  5. Dave, I had no idea it cost that much for a pool! Plus, there is upkeep on top of it. My former boss was on the swim team in high school and got a scholarship to Northwestern where he did his undergrad studies before going to law school in Detroit. He is now 78 and last I heard he still swims one mile every day at 6:00 a.m. He and his wife pay for/share early morning pool time with a local high school swim team during the school year, then, from Memorial Day through Labor Day, there is a community pool not far from their home, when they go for daily sunrise laps. Their backyard has been paved with paver bricks and what is not bricks, his wife has big perennial gardens, so a lap pool would not work well and is probably just as cost prohibitive for them.

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    1. It’s impossible to justify the expense when a community lap pool is within thirty minutes of the house. We won’t pay that much for convenience. Now the challenge is the willpower to make the drive day-in and day-out for the sake of fitness.

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      1. Yes, that is a lot of money. If you have a local swim team, you might want to see if you can share their “pool time” – it would likely only be during the school year though.

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  6. Well, that is definitely expensive. As kids we wanted a pool and my Dad opened the door and said, “there is your pool, the biggest you can get… and he pointed to Lake Michigan.” LOL – I guess since then, I’ve never cared for a pool, but maybe if I used it for exercise that would be different.

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    1. I saw that comment coming from your dad before you even wrote it – ha. We had a pool as kids, but only because my parents bought a house that already had one. I think my dad justified it by buying a pump that was powerful enough to hose down the house in the event of a fire (which was a legitimate threat in the canyon we lived in). My dad was resourceful that way.

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  7. Seems like a lot of money, but probably not too far out of line. I’m sure one of my mom’s neighbours paid $100,000 for an inground pool, (that would be Canadian money) and then they put it in wrong, and then next year it had to be fixed, and in the meantime the pool company went bankrupt, because they didn’t know what they were doing in the first place. The quote sounds sketchy with no breakdown. I’d love a pool, especially as the summers are so much hotter now, but would hate the upkeep, and have too many trees. Our local community centre as a pool for swimming laps, water aerobics (which I keep meaning to sign up for) and swimming lessons for kids, along with two ice hockey rinks, and membership is cheap….or you can just pay $6 each time you got, but yea you have to make the effort to drive there.

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    1. “… the effort to drive there”… there you go. But the convenience of the pool right at home doesn’t justify the cost, and you make a good point about unexpected hurdles or fixes. On top of that, the contractor wants 40% up front just to secure a slot on his calendar (he’s booked out several months). So he gets to use my money for a while, and what if he suddenly goes out of business? Now we’re talking risk as well. No thanks.

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  8. When we had to have our deck replaced, we ran into an artist [pronounced “ar-teest“] and we could walk him away from the project fast enough! I’d forgotten about that guy. I know around here in-ground pools are popular but also costly to maintain. Don’t know how much they cost to have installed though.

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    1. Yep, I’ll never forget our deck “artist” either. What killed me was, his work was everywhere in our community. Stunning decks with outdoor kitchens, glassed-in spaces, and so on. He seemed to have an endless list of customers willing to pay top dollar without a detailed quote. For the sake of our budget-conscious lifestyle, I’m glad we never went for it.

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  10. Hi Dave,

    Ouch! but with the amount of assessments we are having at our condo, I could have built 2 swimming pools.

    I laughed at your experience with contractors and I had a few similar ones. I have learned the hard way the need for detailed quotes. I hate surprises, as in extra charges for things that I assumed were included.

    Good luck with the contractor search! Blessings!

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    1. Assessments – no thanks but, I expect we’ll have to pay one or more of them one of these days. Our neighbors refuse to vote for increases to our annual dues to avoid them. As for contractors, we do our best to get multiple quotes on projects because our neighborhood has large horse properties, and contractors tend to raise their rates when they take in the view 😦

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