The Pool Is Gone. The Kids Have a Kiddie Pool. And Honestly? Best Summer Yet.
The Pool Is Gone. The Kids Have a Kiddie Pool. And Honestly? Best Summer Yet.
ByeByePool Founder Diary — May 2026
Last Tuesday it hit 90 degrees in Massachusetts.
Then Wednesday. Then Thursday. Then Friday.
Four straight days of genuine summer heat in the middle of May, the kind of weather that makes New England feel like it might actually be a real place with a real climate. And I was standing in my backyard, looking at the closed, covered, completely dormant inground pool that we decided not to open this year, waiting to feel some version of regret.
It never came.
Here is what happened instead. My wife pulled a kiddie pool out of the garage — one of those $30 plastic ones that fits three kids comfortably and takes about four minutes to fill from the hose. She set it up in the shade of the big oak in the corner of the yard. The kids spent the better part of two afternoons in it, completely happy, completely occupied, splashing around and doing whatever it is that small children do when you give them water and leave them alone. We grilled both nights. We sat outside. The backyard felt like ours in a way it hasn’t in years.
And then I looked at the big pool. Covered. Silent. Costing me exactly zero dollars that day.
I have to tell you. That felt really good.
What We Were Avoiding
Let me tell you what the alternative would have looked like. If we had opened the pool this year, we would have started paying for it in early May before a single person got in. Opening service. Chemicals to shock it back from a winter of sitting. A service call because something is always not quite right after a New England winter — a fitting that needs attention, a piece of equipment that sounds different than it did last fall, something. That’s $600 to $1,000 before the water is even swimmable.
Then we would have been watching the weather obsessively. Anyone who owns a pool in Massachusetts knows the particular anxiety of checking the forecast in May and June, hoping for the stretch of warm days that justifies the whole enterprise. We would have spent those four beautiful days last week at the pool, yes. But we also would have spent the weeks before them waiting, and the weeks after them watching the temperature drop back into the 60s — which is exactly what happened. Today is 90 degrees. Tomorrow is forecast to be 63.
New England is not a real place. I say this as someone who has lived here his whole life and loves it deeply. The weather here is genuinely unhinged. It will give you four straight days of summer in May and then drop 30 degrees overnight and give you a week of rain as an apology. A pool in this environment is a particularly cruel joke. You invest thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours over a season, chasing a window of perfect weather that New England doles out in unpredictable bursts, usually on weekdays when everyone has work.
We are not chasing it this year. And four days of 90 degree heat later, I can confirm that we are doing fine.
The Thing Nobody Talks About With Young Kids and Pools
I want to spend some time here because I think this is the most important part of what we are learning, and it is something that does not get said directly enough in the pool ownership conversation.
Our kids are young. Young enough that a pool is not a place of joy and freedom for them — it is a hazard that requires constant, vigilant, exhausting supervision. Every single time they are near that pool, an adult has to be watching. Not sort-of watching. Not watching while also checking a phone or having a conversation. Watching. That is the only acceptable standard when small children are near an inground pool, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lucky or wrong.
Drowning is the leading cause of unintentional injury death for children between one and four years old in the United States. It is silent. It is fast. It does not look like the movies — there is no splashing, no calling for help. A child can slip beneath the surface in seconds and be in serious danger in minutes. Every pool owner with young children knows this intellectually, but there is a difference between knowing it intellectually and living with it as a daily background anxiety every time the back door opens.
I lived with that anxiety for years. Every time one of my kids wandered toward the backyard, every time the back gate was left open by a guest, every time we had other people’s children over — I felt it. The pool is a beautiful thing. It is also a body of water in your backyard that cannot be made completely safe no matter how many alarms, covers, or fences you install. The risk cannot be engineered away entirely. It can only be managed, which means someone always has to be managing it.
This summer, that anxiety is gone. The pool is covered, the kids have a $30 kiddie pool in the shade, and I can have an actual conversation with another adult in my own backyard without one eye permanently pointed at the water.
I did not expect that to feel as significant as it does. But it does. It feels enormous.
Now, I want to be clear about something. If your kids are older, if they genuinely know how to swim, if the pool is something your family truly uses and loves — keep it. I mean that. A pool for a family with teenagers who are in it every afternoon, who have friends over, who are actually using it for what a pool is supposed to be used for — that is a completely different calculation. If you are getting real value out of it and the math makes sense for your life, there is no reason to remove it. Enjoy every swim. You have earned it.
But if your kids are young, and the pool is something you are maintaining primarily out of inertia — out of the sense that you have it so you should keep it, or that someday the kids will use it more, or that it adds value to the house — I want you to sit with the weight of that decision honestly. Because the financial cost is real, and the safety burden is real, and neither of those things goes away until the pool does.
The Lifestyle Math Is Getting Clearer
I have written before about the financial side of this. The $3,000 to $5,000 a year in maintenance costs. The $5,000 minimum I am saving by keeping the pool closed this season. The money that is sitting in my pocket right now instead of going to chemicals, electricity, opening service, and the repair that would have inevitably shown up at some point this summer because it always does.
But the lifestyle piece is something I am understanding more clearly as the season progresses. And the lifestyle piece is this: the pool makes your backyard smaller.
When you have a pool, your backyard is organized around the pool. Every other use of the space — playing, grilling, sitting, gardening, running around — happens in whatever is left over after the pool takes its piece. On a modest New England lot, that is not a lot of space. The pool sits at the center of everything, and the rest of your outdoor life arranges itself at the edges.
This summer, without the pool running, the backyard feels different. Not radically different, because the pool is still there under its cover. But there is something about not having it active, not having it as the gravitational center of the yard, that changes how we use the space. The kids play in more of it. We grill in different spots. We set up the kiddie pool wherever makes sense that day. The backyard feels like it belongs to all of us in a more distributed way.
I keep thinking about what that space will feel like after the pool is gone entirely. After removal, we get that footprint back — a real, flat, usable section of yard that could be a patio, a garden, a lawn, a fire pit, or simply open space. I am genuinely excited about that in a way I did not expect to be.
Spring 2027 Is Starting to Feel Real
When I announced that we were not removing the pool this year, I framed it as a delay. A year to save money, to make smarter decisions about the other home improvements competing for the same budget, to prove out the decision by living without an operating pool for a season.
Four beautiful days in May later, the proof is accumulating fast.
We do not miss the pool. We are not sitting in our backyard on a 90 degree afternoon wishing the pool was open. We are sitting in lawn chairs watching the kids splash around in a $30 inflatable, eating food off the grill, completely content. The experience of summer — the actual lived experience — is not materially different. What is different is that I am not thinking about chemicals or pump maintenance or whether the liner has a slow leak. My backyard is a place of rest this summer instead of a place of obligation.
Spring 2027. That is when the pool comes out. The money I am saving this year goes directly toward funding that project. I am not losing a summer by keeping the pool closed. I am funding the removal that will give me all my future summers back.
A Note to the Person Who Is On the Fence
If you are reading this and you have a pool that you are not sure about, I want to offer you the thing that nobody in the pool industry will tell you: it is okay to not love your pool anymore.
It does not mean you made a mistake when you put it in. It does not mean you were wrong to enjoy it. It means that circumstances change. Kids grow up, or they come along and change the safety equation entirely. Maintenance costs climb. The window of weather that actually lets you use the thing shortens every year with a busy life. And at some point, the pool stops being a place of joy and starts being an obligation — something you maintain because you have it, not because you love it.
That is the moment to start asking the question.
What does removal actually cost in your area? What would you do with that space? What would you do with the $4,000 or $5,000 a year that pool maintenance is pulling out of your life?
Those are good questions. They are worth asking honestly.
If you want to understand the real costs of removal before you talk to anyone, start with our Pool Removal Cost Guide. And when you are ready to find out what a specialist in your area would actually charge for your specific pool, get a free quote. It costs nothing. It takes sixty seconds. And it might be the most useful sixty seconds you spend on your house this year.
The pool is still covered. The kids are fine. The backyard is ours.
It is going to be a good summer.
