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That is in even getting a quote......I have had 6 people come and only managed to get 1 quote on paper for a gunite pool. I know they are busy, but it seems like they are all a bit nutty, not on time and only want to sell you what they want to sell you!
Thank goodness I joined this forum and started reading! Thanks to all the mods and members, I have been learning a lot.
Please post if you have experience with this! It seems as though this is worse than building a house!
:) It can be frustrating, can't it? From my own experience I concluded that pool builders are like water: they take the path of least resistance. If there's anything just a tiny bit challenging about your location or design they'll figure out not how much your pool would cost but how many other pools they could build in the same time. That's what happened to us, anyway.
Yeah, they're late. Or they don't show up at all. If they do, they drive up in a Hummer with naked lady cutouts on the mud flaps. They wear gold chains and Rolex watches and right away you think, "Aw geez, how much is this gonna cost me?"
One builder came, looked at out chose site—thirty yards from the house and up on a hill—and told me that spot was impossible for an AGB. Instead, he would build an inground right next to the driveway, and proceeded to outline the shape by spraying my lawn with orange marker paint. Oh, sure, we'd have to build a retaining wall, 5' x 50', and yes, we'd want to be real careful about mowing so as not to roll the tractor off the wall into the pool and no, there wouldn't be much of a surrounding deck unless we wanted to reduce the size of the parking apron and build into it.
And why was the pool on top of the hill impossible? Because he could put in three ingrounds elsewhere for the time and effort it would take to build up there.
Then I called a builder in the next county over, talked on the phone, made an appointment. He called the day before to confirm the appointment. He showed up on time in a 10 year old pickup truck. He wore regular clothes: jeans, Redwings, and no aftershave. He acknowledged my dogs by holding out his hand so they could sniff him. And he thought the hillside location was just perfect because of the truly spectacular view it offers.
I had done a lot of research and reading about the basic cost of the equipment and had a feel for what a fair quote would be, and he came in $500 lower than my budget. He listened, he made suggestions, he and his crew worked very hard to put the pool up in a somewhat challenging location and did a great job. It took 8 months of interviewing pool builders before I found this guy, well worth the frustrations.
Best of luck to you!