Not every pool is worth saving. If yours has been green for two summers, if the kids who wanted it have moved out, if you're paying $2,000 to $4,000 a year to maintain something nobody swims in... filling it in isn't giving up. It's a reasonable decision about how you want to use your yard.
Here's what's actually involved, what it costs, and the one detail most homeowners don't find out until they try to sell.
Worth being honest with yourself before you spend money either way.
A full renovation... new surface, tile, coping, equipment... can run $30,000 or more on an older pool. That's a fine investment if the pool is going to get used. It's a terrible one if you're fixing it out of guilt.
The questions that actually decide it:
If the answer to that last one is immediate and specific — a patio, a garden, a shop, just lawn — you already know.
Partial fill-in — $8,000 to $16,000, two to four days on site.
The top three feet of the shell come off. The floor gets punched through so water drains instead of collecting. The void is backfilled and compacted to grade.
This is the right call if you want lawn, a patio, a garden, or a shed on that spot. It is not suitable if you plan to build anything with a foundation there.
Full removal — $15,000 to $30,000, about a week on site.
Everything comes out: concrete, steel, liner, all of it. The hole is filled with engineered fill and compaction-tested as it goes.
Costs more, takes longer, and it's the only option if you might build on that footprint later — or if you want the cleanest possible story when you sell.
Final price on either depends on pool size, how much equipment access you have, how much fill has to be trucked in, and how much decking or fencing comes out with it.
All three counties — Pender, New Hanover, and Onslow — require a permit to demolish or abandon an inground pool.
Plenty of homeowners don't know that, and plenty of outfits are happy to skip it. Then the house goes on the market and the problem surfaces: no permit, no compaction records, no documentation that the work was done right.
Buyers' inspectors look for filled pools. So does aerial photography, and there are decades of it available to anyone with an internet connection. A filled-in pool is not something you can quietly leave off the disclosure.
Done properly, with the permit pulled and closed and compaction reports in hand, a filled pool is a non-event at closing. Done informally, it becomes a negotiation — or a reason a buyer walks.
If you take one thing from this: get the permit, keep the paperwork.
Two to four days for a partial, roughly a week for a full removal.
Hampstead, Surf City, Topsail Island, Holly Ridge, Sneads Ferry, Wilmington, Wrightsville Beach, Castle Hayne, Leland, Burgaw, Rocky Point, and Jacksonville and surrounding communities.
We're a licensed North Carolina pool contractor — L.101500 — which means the company filling in your pool is the same kind of company that builds them, and knows what's under the deck before the excavator shows up.
Send us the basics and we'll come look at it. No charge, no pressure, written price.
Call (910) 277-5560 or see the full fill-in and removal details here.