Oh, to swim in a crystal-clear, sparkling pool during these hot months of summer! It’s every homeowner’s dream. But, unless you have had a pool before, you probably don’t know what you are getting yourself into if you buy a pool home. Basically, the care and maintenance of a pool involves more work than you can imagine. And that’s if the pool is usable. Bringing a dirty or disintegrating pool back from the edge can be the stuff of which nightmares are made.

First thing you need to know: it’s one thing to buy a home with an intact pool that has been used regularly and is swimmable, and it’s another to buy one with a festering water pit in the backyard that needs extensive renovations. The work and cost can easily suck you dry. Let’s say that you buy a property that has been in foreclosure, with a rotting, green pool. If the pool has a fiberglass shell, draining it can cause the structure to shift. You have no choice, then, but to torturously clean it out. All rubbish and detritus will have to be skimmed out or manually removed, and then you are talking weeks’ worth of chemicals to get the water clear again. 

Even a pool in good working order costs a good amount of money to keep up and running. It’s not just about adding some chemicals every couple of weeks and running the filter. Per summer, you could be looking at - just for a normal pool - about five hundred dollars in repairs and maintenance, and two hundred dollars in chemicals that have to be monitored with an eagle eye to keep the water exactly where it needs to be. 

If you have questions before buying a house about whether the pool is potentially too big a responsibility for you, you can have a pool inspection done at the same time that you are having your other inspections carried out. A pool expert can examine the condition of the structure, the filtering system, the heat pump, and other costly components of the pool, and report back to let you know his or her recommendations. It’s important that you know you have the money to maintain your pool, or you won’t be using it at all. 

Despite all the warnings, it can’t be denied that swimming in your own personal pool is like nothing else in the world. Throwing pool parties, teaching your kids to swim, cooling off on hot days… it really can be just as wonderful as you imagine. It’s just important to go into owning a pool with your expectations in the right place.