If your home was built in the mid-1980s or earlier, there’s a good chance the pool in your backyard is a builder-grade gunite or concrete pool that’s now pushing 35 to 45 years old. These pools were often installed as a standard add-on during a neighborhood’s original construction, not designed around how the current homeowner actually wants to use the yard, and they’re now hitting the age where major repairs start stacking up. Here’s what to weigh before deciding whether to fix it again or fill it in for good, and why homeowners across North Texas are calling Sonova Construction to make the call.
1. Concrete and gunite pools have a real lifespan, and older ones are near the end of it
Concrete and gunite pools typically last 30 to 50 years with consistent maintenance, which means a pool built during the original construction of a mid-80s or older DFW neighborhood is now in its final years of realistic service life. Pools built to original 1980s construction standards were often engineered with less durable materials and shallower plumbing than what’s used today, so age-related failure tends to show up as cracked shells, failing plumbing, and surface deterioration all around the same time rather than as isolated problems.
2. Repair and resurfacing costs on an old pool add up fast
A single resurfacing job on an older gunite pool typically runs $6,000 to $15,000, and that’s before accounting for structural cracks, which can add another $5,000 to $20,000 depending on severity. Add in the smaller items that tend to show up together on a pool this age, worn coping, an aging pump or filter system, outdated tile, deteriorating decking, and a homeowner can easily be looking at $15,000 to $30,000 in cumulative repairs just to bring a 40-year-old pool back to a usable, safe condition. That’s a significant amount of money spent to end up with the same small, dated pool you started with.
3. A pool this old rarely helps resale value, and can actively hurt it
A pool that’s aging, cracked, or clearly original to the house tends to read as a liability to buyers rather than an amenity, particularly for buyers with young children who see an old pool as a safety and maintenance burden rather than a perk. Real estate agents commonly report that an unwanted or outdated pool can reduce a home’s value by $5,000 to $20,000, since buyers factor in the cost of eventually removing or renovating it themselves. Removing a builder-grade pool that no longer fits how buyers want to live often makes a home easier to sell, not harder.
4. Filling it in gives you back real, usable yard space
A typical residential pool and its surrounding decking take up 300 to 800 square feet of yard, space that’s currently unusable for anything except swimming a few months a year. Once filled and graded properly, that same footprint can become a play area for kids, a garden, an expanded patio, or room for the kind of outdoor living space, like a deck or covered porch, that more homeowners actually want today. For a lot of North Texas families, that trade, an old pool for a bigger, more flexible backyard, is the whole reason to move forward.
5. You eliminate ongoing costs that never stop
Even a pool in good working order costs money every month it exists. Between chemicals, electricity for the pump and filter, equipment maintenance, and insurance considerations, annual pool upkeep commonly runs $3,000 to $6,000 a year, on top of any repairs. Filling in an aging pool doesn’t just avoid a big repair bill today, it removes a recurring expense that continues for as long as the pool is there.
6. Doing it wrong causes bigger problems than the pool did
Not all pool removal is equal, and doing it poorly can cost more down the road than leaving the pool alone. A partial fill-in, where only the top of the shell is broken up and the rest is buried, is cheaper upfront, but many buyers and their inspectors are wary of buried concrete, and it typically has to be disclosed at sale. A full removal, where the entire shell is demolished, hauled out, and the cavity is backfilled in engineered layers with proper compaction, costs more but leaves genuinely buildable, disclosure-free land behind, which matters if you ever want to add a deck, garage, or addition in that part of the yard. Skipping proper engineering and compaction on either method is how homeowners end up with settling, drainage problems, or even sinkholes years later, and a redo that costs far more than doing it right the first time.
7. The right contractor plans for what comes after the pool is gone
Removing a pool isn’t just demolition, it’s also regrading the yard, restoring drainage, and turning a hole in the ground into a yard the homeowner will actually enjoy. Sonova Construction handles pool demolition and backfill from start to finish: permitting, full or partial removal based on what the homeowner actually needs, engineered backfill and compaction to prevent future settling, and a finished grade that sets up whatever comes next, whether that’s sod, landscaping, a deck, or an outdoor living space built by the same team. Because Sonova also handles the construction side, homeowners aren’t left with a flat dirt lot and a second contractor to find; the transition from old pool to finished backyard happens as one project.
Serving Homeowners Across DFW
Sonova Construction removes and backfills aging pools for homeowners throughout Plano, Allen, Frisco, McKinney, Wylie, Murphy, Carrollton, The Colony, and surrounding communities across Collin, Dallas, Denton, and Rockwall counties, many of them living in homes with the same builder-grade pools that came standard in North Texas neighborhoods built in the 1970s and 80s.
If you’re deciding whether to repair an aging pool or fill it in for good, contact Sonova Construction for a no-pressure consultation on what your yard could look like instead.
