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A gunite pool built the right way doesn’t just look good it holds up. No shifting, no cracking, no replastering every few years. What you get is a structure that’s engineered to last 30-plus years, built specifically for the soil conditions under your property, not some generic build that treats every lot the same.
That matters more in South Georgia than most people realize. The coastal plain soil around Colquitt County has clay content that moves with moisture it expands when it’s wet and contracts when it dries out. A pool shell that wasn’t built to account for that movement is going to show it eventually. The rebar framework, wall thickness, and curing process all have to be calibrated for what’s actually in the ground here, not what works in North Georgia or the coast.
And once it’s done, you’re looking at six to seven months of usable water every year in this part of the state. April through October, your backyard becomes the place everyone wants to be. That’s not a small thing when the nearest public pool is a drive down SR 133 into Moultrie.
We’re based in Douglas, GA not Atlanta, not a franchise office somewhere out of state. Our team brought more than 30 years of hands-on experience in concrete, plumbing, and pool construction before Deep Waters Pools ever existed as a named business. That experience was built right here in South Georgia, working through the same soil conditions, the same permit offices, and the same summer heat that your Berlin-area project will face.
We founded Deep Waters Pools because we watched too many South Georgia families get burned by contractors who took a deposit and disappeared, or handed the job off to subcontractors the homeowner never met. We don’t operate that way. Every phase of your build excavation, rebar, gunite application, plumbing, electrical, finishing, decking is done by our own crew. One team, one point of accountability, start to finish.
For Berlin homeowners and the families spread across Colquitt County’s farmland, that kind of consistency isn’t just a nice detail. It’s the whole point.
It starts with a site evaluation. Before anything gets designed or priced, we look at your actual property soil conditions, drainage, grade, available space because what’s under your yard in Colquitt County determines how the pool gets engineered. That’s not a formality. It’s what separates a pool that lasts from one that doesn’t.
From there, you get a 3D design rendering of your pool before a single shovel hits the ground. Every shape, depth, feature, and finish is laid out so you can see exactly what you’re getting in your actual backyard. Once the design is locked in, we handle every permit building and electrical through the Colquitt County Building Department. You don’t track paperwork, you don’t schedule inspectors, you don’t navigate the county’s process. We do it.
Construction runs in clear phases: excavation, steel and rebar framework, gunite application, plumbing, electrical bonding and grounding, finishing, and decking. The honest timeline for a quality gunite build in South Georgia is three to six months. That’s the real number, and any builder telling you eight weeks is either cutting corners on curing time or setting you up for a disappointment. When we give you a milestone schedule, we hit it.
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A Deep Waters gunite pool isn’t a starting point you customize up from it’s a complete, custom-engineered build from day one. The process covers everything: site evaluation, full 3D design, all permits and inspections, excavation, rebar and steel framework, gunite or shotcrete application, complete plumbing, electrical bonding and grounding to NEC Article 680, all finishing work, and deck construction. That’s not a list of add-ons. That’s the standard.
The electrical compliance piece is worth understanding if you haven’t looked into it. NEC Article 680 is the federal code that governs how pool electrical systems have to be bonded and grounded to prevent shock hazard in and around water. Not every builder follows it to the letter. We do, on every single build and in a rural area like Berlin where your family is going to spend real time in that pool, it’s not a technicality worth skipping.
After construction, the relationship doesn’t end. We service Hayward, Pentair, Jandy, Sta-Rite, and Zodiac equipment and offer ongoing maintenance programs weekly, monthly, and seasonal. If something needs attention five years from now, you’re not starting over with a stranger. You’re calling the same people who built it.
This is probably the most common concern we hear from homeowners in Colquitt County, and it’s worth addressing directly. The short answer is that cracking is a construction quality problem, not a material problem. A gunite shell cracks when a builder doesn’t account for local soil behavior when the rebar is undersized, the wall thickness is insufficient, or the curing process is rushed. It’s not an indictment of gunite as a material.
The soil in the South Georgia coastal plain has clay content that moves with moisture. It expands when wet and contracts when dry, and that seasonal cycle puts stress on anything buried in it. A pool engineered for those conditions with the right rebar framework, bond beam construction, and curing protocol handles that movement without cracking. A pool built the same way you’d build one in a different soil environment won’t. The difference is whether your builder actually accounted for what’s in the ground on your specific property, and that starts at the site evaluation stage, before design even begins.
For most residential gunite pool projects in South Georgia, you’re looking at a range of $75,000 to $150,000 depending on size, features, depth, and finish selections. That range covers a complete build design, permits, excavation, all construction phases, finishing, and decking. It’s not a base price you stack add-ons onto.
The more useful way to think about cost is over the life of the pool. A quality gunite pool built to last 30-plus years will need resurfacing every 10 to 15 years typically in the $6,000 to $15,000 range when that time comes. Compare that to a vinyl liner pool requiring full liner replacement every five to nine years at $4,000 to $4,500 per cycle, and the long-term math shifts significantly. For a Berlin homeowner making a deliberate, long-term investment in their property, the total cost of ownership over 20 or 30 years tells a clearer story than the upfront number alone.
Both gunite and shotcrete are pneumatically applied concrete meaning they’re shot through a hose under pressure onto a rebar framework to form the pool shell. The difference is in how the concrete is mixed. Gunite is mixed dry and combined with water at the nozzle. Shotcrete is pre-mixed wet before application. In practice, both produce a structurally sound pool shell when applied correctly by an experienced crew.
What matters more than which method is used is who’s applying it and how. Application thickness, rebar placement, curing time, and the skill of the crew doing the work are what determine whether the shell holds up over decades. A gunite pool applied by an experienced team with proper curing protocols will outperform a shotcrete pool rushed through by a subcontracted crew and vice versa. The material is a smaller variable than the builder. When you’re evaluating pool companies in the South Georgia market, ask who’s actually doing the application, not just which method they prefer.
The realistic timeline for a quality gunite pool build in South Georgia is three to six months from signed contract to final inspection. That accounts for permitting through the Colquitt County Building Department, excavation, rebar and steel work, gunite application and proper curing, plumbing, electrical, finishing, and decking with required inspections at each phase.
The curing phase is where a lot of builders cut corners to hit a faster promised timeline. Gunite needs adequate time to cure and reach full structural strength before the next phase begins. Rushing that process to deliver a pool in eight or ten weeks creates the conditions for long-term problems surface issues, structural weakness, and the kind of cracking that gets blamed on South Georgia soil when it’s actually a construction decision. If a builder is quoting you a two-month build, ask specifically how long they allow for curing. The answer will tell you a lot. Starting your project in fall or early winter also tends to mean shorter permit queues and a pool ready to use by the time the South Georgia swimming season opens in April.
We handle every permit required for your build building permit, electrical permit, and every inspection scheduled throughout construction. You don’t need to contact the Colquitt County Building Department, track paperwork, or figure out the county’s process on your own. We handle it completely in-house.
This matters for a few reasons beyond convenience. A contractor who suggests you pull your own permit to save time or money is passing legal liability onto you as the homeowner. If something goes wrong during construction and the permit is in your name, you’re the one responsible. We carry the permits because we’re the ones doing the work and we’re the ones accountable for it. We’ve navigated South Georgia permit offices many times and know what’s required at each inspection phase so there are no surprises, no delays from missed documentation, and no inspection failures from work that wasn’t ready.
Yes, and a significant portion of our work is on exactly that kind of property rural lots, farm land, and larger parcels outside of incorporated city limits across South Georgia. Building on agricultural or rural property in Colquitt County typically means working through county-level permitting rather than municipal, and the site evaluation process becomes even more important because lot drainage, soil composition, and utility access can vary significantly from one parcel to the next.
Larger rural properties also tend to offer more flexibility in pool placement, shape, and surrounding deck or landscape design which is one of the real advantages of a custom gunite build over a fiberglass shell that comes in fixed sizes and shapes. If your property sits outside Berlin proper, along one of the county roads off SR 133, or on farmland that’s been in your family for years, the process isn’t more complicated it just starts with a thorough site evaluation to understand what’s on that specific piece of ground before anything gets designed or permitted. That’s where every Deep Waters build starts regardless of location.
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