The best hour on your
property is the one
after the sun goes down.

We pull it. You never touch it. Rockwall reviews residential pool permits in roughly eight to twelve business days when the plan set is clean, and we submit the engineered shell drawings with the application so it does not bounce back for a revision.

Two things surprise people. First, the barrier and self-closing gate hardware has to be in place before final, and a door alarm is required on any door from the house into the pool area unless you have an approved alternative. Second, the electrical is a separate inspection from the pool, so a slow electrician can hold up your final by a week even when the water is already blue.

Chandlers Landing, The Shores and Stone Creek all want an ARC packet before you dig, and their committees meet monthly, not weekly. That is the real cost: a missed meeting is thirty days, not thirty minutes.

We build the packet: site plan with setbacks, shell dimensions, equipment pad location with a sound note, decking material sample, drainage direction, and the construction access route with a fence protection plan. Send us your HOA's name when you call and we will tell you which of those they actually care about. The Shores wants the equipment screened. Chandlers Landing cares most about which side the trucks come in from.

North of I-30 and up toward the lake, there is a limestone shelf that sits anywhere from four to nine feet down. When the dig reaches it you have three options and all of them cost money, so we would rather find it before you sign.

We probe. Two to four test holes with a hydraulic auger before contract, at our cost, on any lot north of the interstate or on any lot where the neighbor's build hit rock. If we find it, your agreement gets a rock clause with a stated number in it, typically $1,800 for light hammering up to $9,500 for a full day of breaker work and extra haul-off. If we do not find it and it turns up anyway, we split the difference with you up to the first $2,500. We have written that into every contract since 2014 and it has cost us about eleven thousand dollars total, which is less than one lost customer.

Blackland Prairie clay has a plasticity index north of 40. It moves four to six inches vertically between a wet March and a dry September, and it is the reason foundation repair is a growth industry in this county.

A gunite shell handles it if it is built as a monolithic structure and not as a floor with walls attached. Ours are shot in one continuous pour with a twelve inch floor, ten inch walls, doubled steel in the bond beam and a hydrostatic relief valve at the deep end. The decking is the part that actually cracks on this soil, which is why we form real control joints on a pattern and use a compressible expansion joint at the coping instead of caulking over a hard seam.

Partly, and we will be honest about which weeks are bad. Excavation week and gunite day are loud, dusty and involve trucks on your grass. We lay ground protection on the access route, fence the open shell the day it is dug, and haul debris weekly rather than letting a pile grow.

Your sprinkler heads in the access path will get cut. We cap and reroute them as part of the build, not as a change order, and we replace the sod on the route at the end.

The designer above gives you a live figure for the pool you just drew, but the short version for a standard 14 by 28: about $61 to $104 a month from June through September, and roughly 45 percent of that in December.

The three pieces are the pump, the chemistry and the water. A variable speed pump running ten hours at low RPM costs about $21 a month at the current Oncor delivered rate. Salt cell amortization, acid and stabilizer run $22 to $38. And in July this county evaporates about a quarter inch a day off the surface, which on a 392 square foot pool is roughly 2,100 gallons a month, or $13 on your Rockwall water bill. A single speed pump instead of a variable would roughly triple the first number, which is why we do not sell one.

We run three crews and hold about fourteen builds in the schedule at once. Signing today generally puts your dig four to seven weeks out in winter and eight to fourteen weeks out between March and June, when everyone in this county decides at the same time that they want a pool by Memorial Day.

Winter builds are cheaper for us to run and we pass some of that back. A December dig is typically three to five percent under the same build in April.