Hear from Our Customers
A pool built for a Pridgen property is not the same as a pool dropped into a suburban backyard. Your land has its own drainage patterns, its own sun exposure, and if you’re like most Coffee County homeowners, a septic system and a well that have to be factored in from the start. Getting those details right at the design stage is what separates a pool you’ll use for 30 years from one that causes headaches within five.
South Georgia summers are relentless sustained heat in the low-to-mid 90s from June through August, humidity that makes shade feel like a luxury, and kids who are home and restless for months at a stretch. A well-designed pool handles all of that. It gives your family somewhere to actually be during the hottest months of the year, without driving anywhere or paying resort prices to do it.
The other thing worth knowing: in warm-climate markets like this one, a quality inground pool can add 5 to 8 percent to your home’s value. On a Coffee County property, that’s a real number and it’s an asset that holds up over time, especially as the county continues to attract new employers and grow.
We’re based in Douglas the Coffee County seat, just south of Pridgen. This isn’t a company that added your area to a service list from across the state. Our founder has over 30 years of hands-on concrete and plumbing experience built specifically in South Georgia conditions, which means the sandy Coastal Plain soils, the drainage quirks, and the Coffee County permit process are not new territory for us.
We started Deep Waters Pools in 2014 around one straightforward conviction: too many South Georgia families were getting burned by contractors who took their money, cut corners, and moved on. We built this business to be the opposite of that licensed, accountable, and local enough to have a reputation worth protecting in the communities we serve, including Pridgen and the surrounding area.
When you call us, you’re talking to people who have worked in Pridgen and Coffee County before. That matters more than it sounds.
It starts with your property, not a catalog. Our design process begins with a real look at your land where the sun hits, where the drainage runs, where your septic system sits, and how much space you actually have to work with. For rural Coffee County properties around Pridgen, that site assessment often uncovers details that a less experienced builder would miss entirely and discover mid-project instead.
From there, you’ll see a full 3D rendering of your pool before a single shovel touches your yard. That means you can adjust the shape, move a water feature, change the deck layout, or rethink the whole thing before any of it is permanent. Most people find that step alone gives them more confidence in the final design than anything else in the process.
Once the design is locked in, we handle every permit required by Coffee County’s building department, including any environmental health sign-offs needed for properties on well water or septic. Permitting in unincorporated Coffee County involves more moving parts than most homeowners expect, and we’ve done it enough times to know exactly what’s needed and when. From there, excavation to completion typically runs six to eight weeks under normal conditions and if something unexpected comes up on your property, you’ll hear about it directly before anything changes.
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We build exclusively in reinforced concrete and gunite not fiberglass shells, not vinyl liners. That distinction matters more in this market than people often realize. A liner pool in South Georgia’s heat and humidity is a 10-to-15-year replacement cycle. A concrete pool built with proper engineering in Coffee County’s Coastal Plain soils lasts 30-plus years without the fading, cracking, or structural issues that cheaper builds develop over time.
The design itself can go as simple or as layered as your property allows. Infinity edge pools work beautifully on properties with elevation changes or natural backdrops something Pridgen’s rural lots can offer in ways a flat subdivision lot never could. Custom water features like spillovers, deck jets, and waterfalls can be worked into almost any layout. Outdoor living spaces covered patios, outdoor kitchens, fire features, lounge areas are designed as part of the same unified plan, not bolted on as an afterthought. And landscape pool integration ties the whole thing into your existing yard so it looks like it was always supposed to be there.
Every pool we build also comes with a custom safety cover as a standard inclusion. Not an upsell. Not a negotiation. It comes with the pool because in a community full of family households, that’s just how it should work.
Yes, and it’s more involved than most people expect. Because Pridgen sits in unincorporated Coffee County not inside a city limit your pool permit comes from the Coffee County Building and Zoning Department in Douglas, not a municipal office. That means you’re working with county-level processes, which include a standard building permit but can also require sign-offs from the Coffee County Environmental Health Department if your property is on a septic system or well water.
The septic piece is the one that catches people off guard most often. There are required setback distances between a pool and your drain field and between a pool and your well. If those setbacks aren’t verified before excavation starts, you can end up in a serious legal and financial situation. We handle all of this the permit applications, the environmental health coordination, the inspection scheduling because we’ve done it in Coffee County enough times to know exactly what’s required and in what order. You don’t have to figure any of it out yourself.
For most projects in the South Georgia market, a custom concrete inground pool from us runs between $50,000 and $85,000. Where your project lands in that range depends on the size and shape of the pool, the features you include, the complexity of your site, and what outdoor living elements you add around it. A straightforward rectangular pool with a basic deck sits at the lower end. A design with an infinity edge, custom water features, a covered patio, and full landscape integration will push toward the higher end.
What’s worth understanding in a market like Pridgen is the total cost of ownership comparison. A vinyl liner pool might come in cheaper upfront, but you’re typically replacing that liner every 10 to 15 years and that cost adds up fast. A concrete pool built right in Coffee County’s Coastal Plain soils is a 30-plus-year asset. Over the life of the pool, the math strongly favors concrete, even if the starting number is higher.
From excavation to completion, most projects run six to eight weeks under normal conditions. That timeline assumes permits are already approved and the site doesn’t surface unexpected complications during the dig. In Coffee County, the permitting phase including any environmental health coordination for septic or well properties typically adds a few weeks before excavation can begin, so the full timeline from signed contract to swimming is usually closer to three to four months when you account for everything.
The good news about South Georgia is that the climate allows construction to move year-round without the weather shutdowns that affect northern markets. The smartest move for Pridgen homeowners is to start the process in January or February. That gets you in the permit queue early and puts you in the water by the time the real heat arrives in June. Waiting until April or May to start usually means you’re swimming in August at the earliest if you’re lucky.
Yes, and it’s done regularly on rural Coffee County properties but it requires planning from the very beginning of the design process, not as an afterthought. Georgia’s environmental health regulations require specific setback distances between a pool and a septic drain field, and between a pool and a well. The exact distances depend on your specific system and lot configuration, which is why a site assessment matters so much before any design work is finalized.
The practical reality for most Pridgen properties is that there’s enough land to accommodate both the pool and the required setbacks without any real conflict. The issue arises when a builder skips the site assessment, places the pool without verifying setbacks, and the homeowner finds out during inspection or worse, after construction is complete. We coordinate directly with Coffee County Environmental Health as part of our standard permitting process, so this gets resolved at the design stage, not after the concrete is poured.
Rural properties in the Pridgen area have something most suburban pool buyers don’t actual space to work with. That opens up design options that simply aren’t practical on a tight quarter-acre lot. Infinity edge pools, for example, work best when there’s a natural backdrop or a grade change to play off, and properties with acreage in Coffee County often have exactly that. Freeform shapes with extended shallow areas, beach entries, and integrated landscape pool designs also come into their own on larger lots where there’s room to let the design breathe.
The other thing larger properties allow is a genuinely complete outdoor living environment. When you have the space, the pool doesn’t have to be the whole backyard it becomes the centerpiece of a larger design that might include a covered patio, an outdoor kitchen, a fire feature, and landscaping that ties everything together. We design all of it as one unified plan from the start, so the finished result looks intentional rather than assembled piece by piece over the years.
This is one of the most important questions a Pridgen homeowner can ask, and most builders won’t bring it up on their own. South Georgia’s Coastal Plain soils are predominantly sandy loam different from the expansive red clay you find in North Georgia, but with their own set of engineering considerations. Sandy soils are more prone to erosion and shifting around an excavated area, and if backfill isn’t managed correctly during construction, voids can form around the pool shell over time. Those voids lead to settling, cracking, and structural problems that show up years later.
A builder with real experience in South Georgia Coastal Plain conditions knows how to engineer around this from the start proper backfill compaction, drainage design that accounts for the region’s water table in lower-lying areas, and structural specifications suited to the soil type. We’ve been building in these conditions for over 30 years. The pools we build in Coffee County are designed specifically for what’s underfoot here, not adapted from a generic spec sheet written for a different part of the state.
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