Opinion: 'A swimming pool is a complete waste of money'

You wouldn’t assume there’s be a lot of demand for a business that asks you to throw huge amounts of cash into a hole in the ground, before burying it under a layer of concrete, never to be seen again.

And yet I’ve found multiple people, in Sydney alone, willing to come to my house and draw up detailed plans for just such an endeavour.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of them wore the kind of slightly guilty grins that indicated they couldn’t quite believe so many people were willing to pay them so well.

It’s the same smile you’d see on a teenage babysitter, sitting on your couch watching your Netflix, and eating your popcorn, for $20 an hour. Only bigger.

Clearly, I had gone crazy in the heat at some point. Sitting, sweating as the sound of happy neighbours with swimming pools splashed across the gardens between us over several summers, each one seemingly  hotter than the last.

I tried sitting in a cold bath in my boardies, and I think I could have been happy there, but my children were unimpressed, and my wife divorcidal.

I knew, of course, that having a pool installed would not be cheap, and that our particular circumstances – living in inner Sydney with a tiny yard and no side access, would raise the bar to laughable levels.

But hope is a bugger of a thing, and it turns out that if you Google “pool for tiny space sought by gullible idiot”, there are so many sites offering big helpings of the stuff.

Unfortunately, as I was soon to discover, digging holes, even when there aren’t diamonds or gold at the bottom of them, is an expensive business, particularly when done by hand.

It’s also wildly variable. The first smiling assassin, sorry, landscaper, gave an “it won’t be a problem” shrug and said the excavation would take four blokes a week, maybe two.

Then she told me the number that would add up to, and I had to go and lie in the cold bath again. Face down.

Another kind of false hope is that your second, or third, quote will be somehow, magically, better than the first. But my second visitor, who I think had a mouth entirely filled with gold teeth and some kind of Rolls-Royce ute outside, told me the hole would take six men at least three weeks to dig.

Yes, the same size hole the first person quoted for, which is why I asked him whether he thought I wanted a pool or a tunnel to China.

The third, and thus far final quote included a new wrinkle – at some point, we might hit rock out there, and if we did we’d need a special machine, one that costs $380 an hour.

These grave diggers, sorry landscapers, all had nothing but bad news and incomprehensible maths, to offer, although I’m happy to report that the people who offered to build the actual pool in my money-filled hole in the ground were all very reasonable, and similarly priced.

I had tried to convince myself at some point that if the total cost of a pool was less than the stamp duty we would have to pay to move to a house that already had one, it would be worth it. Kind of.

But lately I’ve dabbled in some more relevant math, which indicates that, if I swam in this proposed pool 1000 times, each dip would cost me at least $100, and that’s best-case scenario.

Fortunately, I have found a slightly cheaper alternative to pool envy. Ear plugs.