First, congratulations.

Now the real stuff:

Make sure you know what you are getting into. Talk to others who have pools
and not just about how nice they are on hot days. You want to be ready,
willing and able to take care of it unless you plan to have every aspect of
your pool hired out including the chemical and cleaning.

A pool is work, and it can get expensive. All those thousands of gallons of
water don't clean themself, you have to do it from sweeping the walls and
floors to vacuuming, to skimming leaves and other debris that the skimmers
don't catch to testing daily, sometimes twice for chemical balance and then
adding just the right amount of each.

You will also have homeowners insurance issues to deal with. Your insurance
will either go up, or they will hit you with a rider of non-coverage for the
pool and anything that happens to it, or because of it. If you plan on
having a diving board and/or slide, you can expect even higher insurance
premiums. You have to have fencing, gates, locks, and don't forget a
locking pool house for all of your chemicals and equipment. The chemical
you use are more dangerous out of the pool than in, such as Muratic Acid,
Liquid Chlorine (if you decide to use it) Chlorine Tablets - all of it is
quite caustic, and quite poisonous.

Should you decide to cage your pool (put a screen building over it), and it
would be recommended if the area you are putting your pool in has a habit of
gathering falling leaves or other natural debris, then you can expect your
building expenses, as well as your insurance coverage to increase yet again.

Yes, a pool adds value to your home, but not as much as you might think. I
have an extremely large pool for my area, the largest one in fact but simply
because I bought my home from a guy who owned his own pool building company
and he built himself a bitch of a pool! On average, it costs me about
250-300.00 a month to maintain it from chemical to water bills to electric
bills to run the pumps. During the hot summer and higher evaporation days,
those costs are higher.

If you have kids who will be using the pool, your costs will double and time
as well in cleaning, supplies, and repairing all the **** they WILL break.

If I had my choice, I would not have a pool, even though I use it, but if it
wasn't there I wouldn't miss it nor would I miss all the work. The least
expensive pool cleaning contract I can find for my size pool is 135.00 per
week for 2X week maintenance, and they still don't do half the stuff I do to
keep it clean. I think it's priced high because no one wants to mess with a
pool this size, it takes too much time and they could do six other pools in
the time it takes to do mine. My pool is surrounded by Areca Palms for
privacy, and it is not caged because of the size no one wants to warranty a
roof with that large of span and not guarantee that it won't fall in.

Obviously, you're not jumping in blind since you're asking questions - good
luck with whatever you decide.

My monster: http://www.martweb.net/WNP/p1.jpg at 44.5 ft long by 22.5 ft
wide




"Benign Vanilla" wrote in message
...
We're thinking of having an in ground pool installed, but we know nothing
about them. Can anyone recommend a site or resource that can help a newbie
learn and do research?

BV.