I’m on my first home buyin’ mission, and there seems to be a lot to sort out. One of my desires was to no longer share a common wall, and another was to not have to fuck with plants, shrubs, a garden, etc.
Now a townhome has caught my eye, and it has a swimming pool. It’s a private pool that entirely fills the “backyard” of this place. Yay! No shrubbery to deal with! And it does seem to add to the attraction to the place, although a private swimming pool had not been amongst my criteria for selecting a place.
So, how much trouble is a pool? If you have to leave town for a week or so, can you just leave it? What sort of things do you have to do to maintain it? A friend in Austin has a semi-autonomous device that wanders around his pool and collects leaves, dead wasps, etc.; is that the typical pool maintenance regime these days?
It’s entirely fenced in, so I’d guess any drowned trespassing minors would fall on their parents tab.
I haven’t lived in a house with its own pool for a number of years. Perhaps technology has improved greatly since then. But at the time the process of keeping the pool clean was fairly labour-intensive, and the various chemicals were quite expensive too. After a couple of years, once the thrill of having our own pool had worn off, the cleaning and maintenance became a real nuisance.
My advice - buy a house **without ** a pool and join a gym, or patronise the local council pool instead.
I have a pool. Five years now. They are much better than in the old days and upkeep is a snap.
There is a vacuum cleaner that runs constantly that picks up the dust and dirt and leaves and crap at the bottom of the pool, and the skimmer takes away floating leaves and paper and stuff. You only need to clean the main pump filter every once in awhile…depending how windy and dirty the pool has gotten…and you just have to add some chlorine tablets in a floater. That is about it.
Yes, the old pools were a pain in the behind to keep up, but new technology has made it easy to keep a pool clean and safe. I love ours, and go swimming every day after work, and hang out there every weekend.
We have an in-ground swimming pool. Our house was built 40 years ago in this “natural” style a la trying to build the neighborhood unobstrusively inside an existing, really, really old forest.
This makes ours pain a pain in the ass b/c pine needles and leaves from impossibly tall trees are always falling into it. My father vacuums and nets the pool everyday and it seems like he’s always fiddling with the filter and adjusting the chlorine to give the water that really clear look. He can afford the time he spends making it look pristine, though, since he’s at home.
The biggest pain in the ass is the fact that we live in the Northeast so we have to close and open the pool every summer. I actually think that’s the worst part. My parents refuse to hire anyone so the whole family basically has to do it. You have to pump the water from the snow and rains and garbage off the pool cover, remove the pool cover, clean it off, fold it up and then the process starts all over again. In the fall you have to close it down again, which once more requires cleaning the cover.
Really depends what you consider “hard work.” It definitely requires upkeep depending the area you live in.