THE BURIED-BOAT ARGUMENT, SHORT VERSION: an empty pool shell in the ground is a boat the water table wants to float — skip the engineering and one wet March delivers your old pool back through the new lawn.
Services & rates
Removal & restoration, priced from
Prices from last season’s Mudstone belt removals and cover permits through the first establishment visit; access, slopes and the shell the previous builder actually poured are priced at the free walk. Every job ends with the compaction record — lift by lift, probe by probe — bound and handed over, because the day you sell this house somebody will ask what is under the lawn, and the answer should be a document.
Partial decommissionfrom $11,400
Top two feet off and removed, base punched, rubble fill in compacted lifts, soil cap, lawn
Full extractionfrom $23,800
The whole shell out — steel, gunite, plumbing, the works — and the ground made honest again
Deck conversionfrom $6,900
The pool goes, the patio stays: drainage re-graded into the old shell footprint
Engineering & permitsfrom $1,850
Soils, the county decommission filing, the compaction record that travels with the deed
Equipment & line retirementfrom $1,200
Pads, heaters, salt cells, surge tanks, gas and power properly disconnected and capped
The replantfrom $3,300
Topsoil to depth, lawn or meadow, and the first season’s establishment visits
Services
The ebb, in order
01
The walk & the water reading
Before anything is priced we read the ground: the soils, the slope, the water table in a wet March, the access for machines. The walk decides partial against full — a sound shell three feet below grade and a raised bond beam are two different jobs — and the honest verdict on that deck you want to keep.
02
Permits & the county filing
Most jurisdictions on the belt want a decommission permit and a drawing: what comes out, what stays, where the water goes. We file it, we chase it, and the drawing in the filing is the drawing we build — no creative amendments between the county’s stamp and the first machine.
03
Drain, punch, retire
The pool is drained responsibly — to the storm system where the county allows, never to the neighbour’s grade — the base is punched for hydrostatic relief, and the equipment lives its last day properly: gas capped, power isolated, the pad and its plumbing hauled away with the rest.
04
Fill, compact, prove
Engineered fill in compacted lifts, probed and recorded lift by lift, to within a finger of the finished grade — then topsoil, the replant, and the compaction record bound for the deed. The settling that plagues cheap fill-outs does not get a chance here, and the proof is in the document.
Why removal is engineering
The bit nobody says out loud
Every trade has its failure mode and the fill-out trade’s is quiet, delayed and expensive: rubble dumped in a shell, topped with soil, mowed for a season — and then a wet spring floats the floor up through the lawn and the pool you paid to remove comes back as a swamp with a mortgage. The fix is unglamorous and non-negotiable: relief holes through the base, engineered fill in eight-inch compacted lifts, a probe reading after every lift, and a record of the whole thing that travels with the deed. That is the entire difference between a removal and a burial.
A filled pool is a buried boat: the water table rises underneath it every spring, and without relief holes and engineered fill it will buoy the whole floor up through your new lawn in one wet March.
How it goes
First call to first lawn
The same sequence on every job — the only variable is your project.
Week 1
The walk & the verdict
Ninety minutes, the soils file, a tape and a long look at where the water goes. Partial or full, keep-the-deck or all-of-it — the verdict and the fixed quote land inside a week, and walking away from the whole idea is a legitimate outcome the walk is allowed to recommend.
Weeks 2–4
Permits & the filing
The decommission drawing, the county filing, the utility locates, and the schedule with dates in it. You sign once; the calendar between signature and first machine is ours to hold and yours to hold us to.
Weeks 5–6
The lap itself
Drain, punch, break and remove — or fill, in engineered compacted lifts with the probe and the record after every one. Machines are on site days, not months; the gate closes behind them nightly, and the dust is watered because neighbours exist.
Weeks 7–8 & after
Soil, seed & the record
Topsoil to depth, the replant you chose — lawn, meadow, the orchard somebody always asks about — and two establishment visits in the first season. Then the handshake and the bound compaction record, which outlives all of us and makes the house easier to sell, not harder.
2025 — 2026, the belt
Gardens where pools were
Six retirements from last season and the one before, photographed one spring on — meadows, lawns, an orchard and a deck that stayed, each with its compaction record in the house file and its first establishment visit survived. The captions say what each yard used to be, which is the only pool talk left on the property.
Fair questions
Questions at the end of a pool
The five every belt kitchen reaches once the cover has been on too many summers. The yard line answers seven to five, Winnock time.
Is removal cheaper than the remodel we keep postponing?
Usually, and the arithmetic is short: a remodel — re-plumb, refinish in pebble or quartz, new equipment — runs two thirds of new-build cost and buys a pool you have already decided you do not use. A partial removal runs a fraction of that and buys the yard back. The walk prices both honestly, and about one household in six takes the remodel after all, with our numbers in their pocket and our blessing.
Can we build on the spot afterwards?
A properly engineered removal leaves ground you can build on: compacted structural fill, probed lift by lift, with the record to prove it. A cheap fill-out — rubble thrown in and topped with soil — does not, and the county will say so at footing inspection. If an extension is the plan, tell us at the walk: the fill spec changes and the permit drawings anticipate the footings.
What happens to all the equipment?
It is retired properly or it becomes somebody’s problem: gas capped and pressure-tested by the licensed fitter, power isolated at the panel and the circuit documented, the heater, pump, salt cell and filter hauled and recycled, and every buried line either removed with the shell or abandoned and capped on the record. Surge tanks and plant on the belt’s older pools get the same honest end as everything else.
Will the ground settle and leave a dip?
Not ours, and the sentence you just read is the single most common thing our clients were promised by whoever filled a pool before us. Settlement is what fill does when nobody compacts it in lifts, probes it, and records the readings. Every Ebbtide fill is eight-inch compacted lifts with documentation, and in sixteen years the callback list for settled lawns is shorter than the crew truck’s oil-change log.
We might sell instead. Does a removed pool help or hurt?
Helps, when the paperwork exists: the compaction record and the decommission permit answer the surveyor’s question — what is under the lawn — with a document instead of a shrug, and a flat usable garden sells against a tired pool every time. Undocumented removals invite the worst kind of buyer negotiation; ours travel with the deed the same way a build ledger would, in the other direction.
Word of mouth
The belt, after the ebb
Eleven summers of guilt, three remodel quotes we never signed, and then Ebbtide turned the whole thing into a wildflower meadow in about six weeks. The compaction record lives with the deeds now, the house sold over asking with a garden instead of a liability, and the buyers’ surveyor called it the best-documented yard he had seen that year.
The neighbour’s pool was filled cheap in the nineties and floated its floor up through the lawn in a wet March — I had watched it happen. Ebbtide punched the base, compacted every lift, and handed me a binder of probe readings. Two springs on, the lawn is level, the trampoline stands where the deep end was, and the binder has already answered one buyer’s question.
They kept the deck, re-graded the drainage into the old footprint, and turned the equipment pad into a herb bed. The pergola goes up next month. It is the least dramatic construction project I have ever been part of, which after thirty years of pool ownership was exactly the drama I was shopping for.
Free walks across Winnock Fields & the Mudstone belt · (555) 031-7725 · done@ebbtide.example
Start with the walk
Tell us the pool and the yard you would rather have. The walk is free, the verdict covers removal AND remodel honestly, and the fixed quote carries the compaction record in writing. done@ebbtide.example