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Water Features

Water Features

Water features are among the most important elements of your outdoor living environment. The attraction of moving water is undeniable and they are so popular that thousands of installers and manufacturers dedicate their businesses to the creation and maintenance of water features. My venture into the blatantly obvious.

Water features are a commitment. They involve the use of pumps, plumbing, filtering, waterproof materials,lighting, and several other disciplines.

Let’s begin with swimming pools.

Swimming pools have become a natural adjunct to landscape design. Theoretically, anyone can build a swimming pool. If you own a phone and have a check book, you can build a swimming pool using the following ten step procedure:


  • #1 Get a plan for the pool
  • #2 Acquire engineering for the pool (there are engineers who have boiler plate engineering for swimming pools in your area)
  • #3 Call a pool excavator to dig the hole
  • #4 Call a swimming pool rebar installer
  • #5 Call a swimming pool plumbing company
  • #6 Call a local gunite or shotcrete company
  • #7 Call a pool coping and decking company
  • #8 Call a swimming pool tile installer for the waterline tile and skimmer
  • #9 Call a swimming pool plaster company to install the interior finish
  • #10 Call a pool maintenance company to monitor the pool chemicals for the first 30 days while the interior finish cures so that you do not inadvertently damage the new finish with bad chemistry.

There are facets of each of these disciplines that you should know which will affect the quality of the final product, but a tome the size of “War and Peace” would be required to list them all. When you consider that you will not receive the volume discounts that pool builders receive and you will need to supervise each of the trades, building your own pool may not be your best value.

Swimming pools are wonderful water features that have function as well as beauty. Unless your are an olympic swimmer you will spend more time viewing your pool than using it for swimming, which is to say, make it beautiful to look at as well as fun to swim in.

A well designed pool requires maintenance, but far less maintenance than a poorly planned pool. Modern amenities such as variable speed pumps, automatic valves, automatic fillers and pool controllers take away the tedium of using your pool and maintaining it.