- Kaitlin and Josh Chmil moved to Tennessee and bought a house with a rundown indoor pool in 2020.
- The couple, who have DIY experience, spent thousands of dollars and hours to make it usable.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kaitlin and Josh Chmil, a couple who renovated an indoor pool in their Crossville, Tennessee, home. The story includes comments made by Kaitlin Chmil on Facebook. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Kaitlin: We moved from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Crossville, Tennessee, Thanksgiving 2020.
We absolutely love St. Pete. We miss it a lot and go back and visit often, but for the expense of everyday life, we wanted land, we wanted property. Tennessee has no state income tax. Our land is completely unrestricted, so we don't need a lot of different permits and permissions, there's no HOA — nothing like that.
Neither of us had been here before. Josh came up and saw the house for the first time during the inspection, and I saw it for the first time the day we moved in.
We had no desire for an indoor pool or anything like that. It wasn't even a thought.
One of the biggest hurdles when purchasing the house had to do with the pool. Nobody would appraise it.
Josh: They didn't have any comps in the area because an indoor pool is not a very common thing — especially in middle Tennessee.
The pool was in bad shape, but we figured we could fix it
Kaitlin: We used to joke that the pool looked like it belonged within Banksy's Dismaland because it was not usable.
Josh: Prior to buying, we looked at it and we're like, "Oh yeah, we could do this." And then we actually started touching it and seeing what was wrong and uncovering things that we may not have expected.
The second day we turned the pool on, the pool pump set on fire.
A lot of stuff was broken and worn out. There was dry rot and equipment seized up. So we went through a lot of trouble with having to replace things.
Kaitlin: In our first year, we were able to use the pool for maybe a month or two. That was hard, sitting and looking at it like, "Did we make the biggest mistake of our lives?"
Josh: There were definitely times when it was really daunting and we questioned whether it was going to be as good as we hoped or if we'd be able to do it in a timely manner.
Kaitlin: The pool is half-filled with tears.
We started looking for resources, but because of living more remotely and the fact that we're not commercial use, there really was a gap in who's available. There just really aren't people who have the skillset professionally to hire and bring in. And we spent a long time looking, researching, trying to figure it out.
Josh: There were months when we didn't make progress because we didn't know what the right answer was. And you can't just throw money at stuff sometimes.
Kaitlin: It's probably $150 a month to run. It's heated with natural gas. And then the total has been about $30,000 worth of work that we have put into it. A majority of that has been supplies and materials because we've done a majority of the labor ourselves.
We thought it would take a year. We're three years in now.
Having a pool is worth it, but it's a project we would not do again
Kaitlin: As happy as I am with how things are going now, I would not do it again and would not recommend an indoor pool to anyone unless you have a pool specialist and contractor in the family.
Josh: The older we get, the less we want to do. We want to sit back and enjoy some of the things we've done because I feel like we've been in this perpetual cycle of buy, renovate, sell, buy, renovate, sell, buy. Now we just want to enjoy what we've done.
We learned a ton about things that we had never even thought about before, so it definitely helped us hone our skills and confidence a lot. But I don't necessarily want to use those skills.
Kaitlin: I was floating in the pool, reading a book, looking at the snow thinking when we moved in, that exact spot, that exact view, is the image that I had in mind for being really happy and relaxed in the space and finally getting there.
Health-wise, it's great to go down and swim laps in the evening. We got a projector. One of the walls is totally white so we can watch movies in there.
My best friend and her husband came up last Christmas and we were all sitting in the pool room watching movies on floats, having drinks, and it was a really nice time.
I would say it was worth it, only because it's been a really cool once-in-a-lifetime experience that the vast majority of people don't get. I feel incredibly fortunate and lucky to be able to put that in my life, in my family's life, my daughters' lives.