What it costs to build a pool

Let's just start this post off saying that I've wanted a pool since I was a little kid. My wife would probably argue that I am still a kid which is why we have had a pool at every house we've lived in here in Austin. You can see a few prime examples below. How much did they cost? Not much. How long did they last? Not long enough. Did I love them? Abso-fucking-lutely. 

Unfortunately when it comes to a real pool, the whole DIY thing goes out the door pretty quickly (though I do find the idea of a natural pool fascinating). We had planned on a pool for our house since day one. In fact the whole house is designed around the central courtyard and the pool is the heart of that. Unfortunately for budget reasons we cut it out of the scope of the original build. Last spring though we set out to phase it in and we had one major criteria, the cheaper the better. We would have loved to do an infinity edge, lots of interesting tile, and a whole bunch of other things but mostly we just wanted a pool as inexpensively as possible. We got quotes from close to 1/2 dozen companies from high end to basic and prices ranged from about $40k to $70k for a small pool. We chose the cheapest which happened to be one of the big national chains Anthony Sylvan. Over all we were pretty satisfied with the experience. It took about as long as they said it would and they had good customer service. The quality is a bit rough, but honestly as soon as you fill it with water you don't even care. We financed ours through Moody Bank which I highly recommend. 

I know some of you are going to ask about details, so here goes.  Our pool is about 30' x 8'. If you are familiar with the Hotel San Jose pool it's 24' x 8', so our is that plus the 6' sun shelf. It goes from 3' to 5' deep and has two lights. We did supply our own tile to try and make it look a bit nicer than the standard discount pool. We sourced 2x2 zelige tiles from Cle Tile. The color combo is the same as the fountains in the Majorelle Garden in Morocco. We pulled a lot of inspiration from there. The pool finish is just the basic PebbleTec. It has bit of color fleck in it but not much. They did have a whiter one but it was more expensive. The coping is just good old Texas lueder Limestone. The equipment is all pretty basic as well, no heater, no salt water or anything fancy like that. No decking was included in the price, that's part of this years project. Slowly but surely we'll get there. For now though I'm just glad to have a place to drink my margarita and dip my toes.