NoOne N Particular writes:

The single most important
thing you can do is be very patient, and think long and hard about how
badly you really want this pool.

Wayne, you have such a reasonable and experienced view of this. I've
tried to post over many years about the true costs and true benefits.
It seems so many are bent on having a pool without knowing really why.

Making a foolish luxury purchase like a car or a boat or RV or pet is
unlike a swimming pool. Let me postulate this law:

You can't sell a used swimming pool.

You can try to sell the property, but you won't recover the pool
expense, because the market prices property based on utility, and the
value of a "pool home" to the market is next to nothing above (or even
below) the same home without a pool. Of course, the wise buyer can
recognize this, and *buy* a used pool for next to nothing, in which case
he *can* "sell" it for about what he paid for it.

A swimming pool has no on-off switch.

It continuously demands care, feeding of costly and noxious "food",
maintenance, and repairs, routinely and occasionally in crisis, whether
you benefit from it a little, a lot, or none at all. You car quits
consuming gasoline when you turn it off. Your pool continues to consume
its tribute whether you put swimmers in it or not.

You cannot put it to sleep when you tire of it or it is too sick, and
you cannot drop it off at the kennel when you go on vacation.

Pools are pretty to look at, if maintained at great expense. Pools are
fun to swim in, if you maintain them at significant expense. If you
think you will maintain your pool without much expense, both amortized
and seasonal, it will become either ugly or unsanitary, or perhaps both.

Nature abhors purity.

That is, nature abhors swimming pools. A swimming pool is all about
purity, which nature abhors (you may have heard, "nature abhors a
vacuum", but the general form is as I say, a vacuum being a special case
of purity, namely, pure nothing). A swimming pool is a most unnatural
thing, a concrete shell of sterile water with a bizarre, unstable
chemistry. Nature will attack it in every way: dust, bacteria, bugs,
oils, sweat, algae, mold, fungus, viruses, urine, feces, metals, amines,
leaves, pollen, earth moving, parts dissolving, crud precipitating,
bonds breaking, clean things staining, structures cracking, pipes
squirting water, pipes sucking air, smooth things getting rough,
bearings sticking, handles breaking, on and on. A swimming pool turns
into a non-swimming pool in a matter of days or hours when you make a
mistake or neglect it. And you will make mistakes, many of them. And
you will neglect it.

The kids will love you for it, though. What is that worth?

Richard J Kinch
Palm Beach County, Florida
http://www.truetex.com/pool.htm
http://www.truetex.com/poolcontrol.htm