The hidden costs of a pool project are not really hidden. They are missed.

They get missed because there is a gap between what a homeowner knows, buying maybe one pool in their lifetime, and what a builder knows after a thousand of them. Nobody is hiding anything. The questions just never come up, and then they come up at the worst possible moment.

Becky Martinez is the Director of Intelligence at River Pools Virginia. She started there in high school running water tests, and 20 years later she has had her hands on the planning, permitting, and logistics of more than 1,000 inground pool installations. She has watched these surprises land on homeowners more times than she can count, which makes her a very good guide for this one.

In this conversation, Becky walks through seven categories of cost that homeowners most often miss:

• Site restoration after the crews leave, and where your builder's scope of work actually stops
• The plat, and why the document that defines your property lines and setbacks is the most important piece of paper in the project
• Excavated dirt, which comes out of the ground at nearly twice the volume of the pool itself and has to go somewhere
• Drainage, patio, and landscaping, which together can account for half the total project budget
• Public and private utilities, including what a locate service will and will not mark
• Safety barriers, where fencing, covers, and door alarms are code requirements rather than upgrades
• Retaining walls and the permit stack, which on a complicated site can run to six permits or more

Along the way, Becky tells the story of a homeowner whose county did not require a plat, who assumed the fence line was the property line, and who ended up with a good portion of a finished patio on the neighbor's land. That one worked out. It very easily might not have.

None of this is a reason to skip the pool. It is a reason to ask better questions before you sign, and to get every answer line itemed in the contract. Becky's closing advice is worth the listen on its own: do not fixate on the pool, and do not put the project off a year to avoid the work of planning it, because the planning is the part that saves you money.

Start planning your backyard at https://www.riverpoolsandspas.com, where you'll find self-guided decision tools, a cost estimator, and hundreds of articles built to help you dot the i's and cross the t's before you break ground.

The Pool Guides Podcast – by River Pools
Catch the Wave.