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Inground Pool Construction Cost and Financing
Inground Swimming Pools: What You Are Paying For And How To Pay For It
By Bryan Hull, Co-Owner of Del Val Pools & Spas
I can remember being a young child and watching reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies. It was a show about a rural family from Big Tussle, Missouri and a “poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed” finding oil on his property, striking it rich, and moving his family to Beverly, Hills, California. Donna Douglas played Elly May Clampett, and she referred to their swimming pool as the “cement pond.” I can still hear her accent to this day. Swimming pools have come a long way since that series came to television almost sixty years ago and ran for nine seasons.
Oddly enough, six decades later, that term “cement pond” still hangs around, but it’s gunite that forms the outer shell of a pool. It’s a bit more expensive and a lot more effective than bags of cement from Lowe’s or Home Depot. Gunite is a cementous and aggregate mixture pressurized through a hose, mixed with water, and pneumatically projected at high velocity on to a surface, frame, or form. Similar compounds are used to line tunnel walls, mines, and subways – in other words, gunite is quite strong and highly durable. The individual applying the gunite acts as your pool sculptor and can regulate the amount of water and pressure as he builds up areas like the pool keel, walls, and sun decks.
As proficient as the gunite may be, it’s the underlying frame or cage that gives the pool it’s strength. At DEL VAL, we frame out the pool with steel reibar rods that form twelve inch squares. Some contractors try to get away with less because less materials can mean less cost/more profit, but in the end that comes back to bite the pool contractor and the homeowner, and that never ends well. The more steel one uses and the thicker the gunite – the stronger the pool. All one has to do is watch a pool being shot with gunite to get the sense of this structural relationship.
The great thing about reibar and gunite is that using such allows DEL VAL to build custom pools focusing on the customer’s vision of shape and integration into the back yard. (Sorry Elly May – we know your pool was a standard oval.) There’s also something to be said about the Biblical verse comparing a house built on stone to a house built on sand that translates well to pool construction and design. The thickest part of a pool is its keel – the base that can be imagined as the spine of the structure. If a contractor cheaps out on this part of the pool, the consequences a few years later can be disastrous.
At DEL VAL we love working in the tri State area. The soil is perfect for most applications, and thankfully, we have never had to blast away an excavation as it can get costly- plus makes one quite unpopular with the neighbors. Southern New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware are mostly sand and clay which is easy for excavation and holding back underground hydrostatic pressure while we do our magic. Pools at the Jersey shore on the coastal islands are a different type of construction and covered in a separate blog, but we love those too, because what we build, we know will stay – “Sandy-proof” as the locals like to say.
Popular upgrades like quartz plaster finishing, salt water natural chlorination systems, sun decks, spas, waterfalls, fountains, firepits, hardscape decking, and lighting can add to the costs, but it’s the pool construction end of things where the heaviest dollars are spent. That’s where one’s reputation and relationships become paramount. DEL VAL Pools are known for their structural integrity, their durability, and their quality. Planning Boards, Zoning Boards, and Permit Departments know us, and they know our pools. Frequently, we are called upon by municipalities and builders to provide counsel on pool construction and design.
Most important for our customers are the relationships DEL VAL has built with banks willing to assist our customers with financing. We have a number of strong financial partnerships with local and national banks as a result of the consistency in our custom pools, and with interest rates being at record lows, now is the perfect time to explore just how a swimming pool can fit into your budget.
