Hear from Our Customers
Coffee County’s swimming season runs from April straight through October. For a family on a rural Mora property, a gunite pool is not a luxury item sitting behind a suburban fence. It is the most-used outdoor space on your land, the reason the grandkids want to visit, and the thing that makes a South Georgia summer actually enjoyable instead of something you just survive.
Gunite gives you something fiberglass and vinyl cannot: the pool is built to your property, not the other way around. If you have a large yard, a natural slope, or a specific layout in mind, gunite adapts to it. Any shape, any depth, any configuration designed around how your family actually uses outdoor space, not around what fits on a factory floor.
A properly engineered gunite shell, built for South Georgia’s Lower Coastal Plain soil conditions, will hold up for 20 to 30 years before any major structural work is needed. The resurfacing window is every 10 to 15 years not the 3 to 7 years that fiberglass-only competitors quote when they are trying to make gunite sound expensive. When the build is done right, the math works in your favor for decades.
We are based in Douglas the Coffee County seat, about 10 to 15 miles from Mora. That is not a detail we throw in to sound local. It means when something needs attention after your pool is built, we are a short drive away, not a 90-minute round trip from Valdosta or Savannah.
Our founding team did not start in 2014 and figure it out from there. We spent 30-plus years in concrete, plumbing, and pool construction before launching Deep Waters working in this specific soil around Mora and Coffee County, navigating the permitting process, and building in a climate that demands real regional knowledge. No shortcuts, no learning curves on your property.
We started this company because we watched South Georgia families get burned by contractors who overpromised and disappeared. That is still the reason we do every phase ourselves excavation, plumbing, gunite, electrical, finishing, decking with our own crew, no subcontractors, no strangers cycling through your land. One team. One point of contact. One company that stands behind the result.
It starts with a design conversation, not a sales pitch. We want to understand how you use your outdoor space, what your property looks like, and what you actually want from a pool before anything else happens. From there, we build a 3D rendering so you can see the finished product before a single shovel breaks ground. That step matters more than most people expect it is a lot easier to adjust a design on a screen than after excavation has started.
Once the design is locked in, we handle every permit required for your build. Because Mora is in unincorporated Coffee County, permitting runs through county-level agencies rather than a city permit office a process with its own requirements and timeline that we have navigated hundreds of times. You do not fill out a form or schedule an inspector. We handle the building permit, the electrical permit, and every required inspection, start to finish.
Construction runs in clear phases: excavation, rebar and steel, gunite application, plumbing, electrical bonding and grounding, surface finishing, and deck installation all performed by our own crew. The total timeline for most residential gunite builds runs three to six months depending on design complexity and permit processing. If you start the process in the fall, you can realistically be swimming by the time April arrives. We give you a realistic timeline upfront, not a number designed to win the job and disappoint you later.
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Mora sits in Georgia’s Lower Coastal Plain sandy loam to loamy sand soils that drain well but require specific knowledge of compaction, backfill, and structural engineering to support a concrete shell correctly over time. A builder who has never worked Coffee County soil does not know how to account for that. We do, because we have been working in it for over 30 years.
Every gunite pool we build includes full in-house excavation, steel and rebar installation, gunite application, all plumbing and hydraulics, electrical bonding and grounding to NEC Article 680 standards, interior surface finishing, and deck construction. Nothing is handed off. The same crew that digs the hole finishes the deck. That matters for quality control, and it matters for accountability there is no subcontractor to point fingers at when something does not go right.
After the build, we do not hand you a manual and disappear. We provide ongoing weekly and monthly maintenance, full equipment service and repair across Hayward, Pentair, Jandy, Sta-Rite, and Zodiac systems, and pool rescue for neglected or damaged pools. For a Mora homeowner on a rural property where finding a reliable service tech willing to make the drive is already a challenge, having the company that built your pool also maintain it is not a small thing. It is one phone number, one team, for the life of your pool.
This claim comes up a lot in South Georgia, and it is worth addressing directly. A properly engineered gunite shell designed with adequate rebar, correct wall thickness, and appropriate curing time for this region’s specific soil conditions does not crack from normal ground movement. What causes cracking is a construction failure, not a material failure. Rushed curing, inadequate steel, walls built too thin: those are builder problems, not gunite problems.
Mora sits in Georgia’s Lower Coastal Plain, where the soil is sandy loam rather than the heavy clay you find north of the Fall Line. This soil drains well, which actually reduces the hydrostatic pressure concerns that cause problems in other regions. The key is that your builder has to know how to engineer for it how it compacts, how it behaves under load, and how to build a shell that performs in this specific environment. Thirty-plus years of building in Coffee County soil is not something a fiberglass-only competitor can replicate.
Most residential gunite pool projects in Georgia fall somewhere between $75,000 and $150,000, with the majority of homeowners landing around $100,000 for a full custom build. Where your project lands within that range depends on size, shape complexity, depth, water features, spa additions, tanning ledges, decking material, and equipment choices. A straightforward rectangular pool with basic decking sits at the lower end. A freeform design with a spa and waterfall sits higher.
For Mora-area homeowners, the more important number is the long-term one. A properly built gunite pool adds approximately 7 percent to your property value and requires resurfacing only every 10 to 15 years under normal conditions. Compared to alternatives that need significant work every 3 to 7 years, the total cost of ownership over 20 to 30 years is often lower with gunite not higher. We are happy to walk through a realistic estimate based on your specific property and what you are looking to build.
For most residential gunite builds, the realistic timeline is three to six months from design sign-off to a finished, swimmable pool. Design and permitting typically run four to eight weeks. Because Mora is in unincorporated Coffee County, your permits go through county-level agencies rather than a city permit office we handle that process entirely, but county timelines can vary depending on workload and inspection scheduling, so we factor that in from the start.
Once permits are issued, active construction on a standard residential gunite pool runs six to ten weeks depending on design complexity, weather, and finish selections. The builds that take longer are usually the ones with attached spas, complex water features, or custom decking that requires additional curing time. We give you a realistic timeline at the start of the project not a number designed to get you to sign and then stretch out. If you start the process in September or October, a Memorial Day swim is a reasonable target for most Mora-area builds.
Because Mora is an unincorporated community, your pool permit does not go through Douglas’s city permit office it goes through Coffee County’s building and inspection department. The required permits include a building permit for the pool structure itself and an electrical permit covering the bonding, grounding, and equipment wiring. Georgia state law mandates electrical bonding and grounding per NEC Article 680 for all swimming pool installations, and that applies in unincorporated Coffee County just as it does inside any incorporated city.
We handle all of it every form, every submission, every required inspection so you never have to navigate the county’s process yourself. This matters more than it might seem. An unpermitted pool in Georgia is not just a regulatory issue. It creates real legal exposure at resale and can result in fines or forced remediation at the worst possible time. When we pull the permits and manage every inspection, you have a fully documented, code-compliant pool with a clean paper trail for as long as you own the property.
Gunite and shotcrete are both pneumatically applied concrete the difference is in how they are mixed before application. Gunite is a dry mix that combines with water at the nozzle during application. Shotcrete is a wet mix that is fully combined before it reaches the nozzle. Both methods produce a durable, structural concrete shell when applied correctly by an experienced crew, and both are used widely in residential pool construction across the South.
In practical terms for a Mora homeowner, what matters more than the method label is the crew applying it and the engineering behind the shell. Wall thickness, rebar placement, curing time, and soil preparation have a far greater impact on how your pool performs over 20 to 30 years than whether the mix was wet or dry at the nozzle. We use the method best suited to each specific project and soil condition and because our crew handles the application in-house, there is no third-party gunite contractor whose quality we cannot control.
Yes and for a Mora-area homeowner, this is worth thinking about before you choose a builder, not after. Finding a pool service company willing to make regular trips out to a rural Coffee County property is not as straightforward as it is in a subdivision closer to Douglas. Some service companies simply do not cover the distance, and the ones that do may have long response windows when equipment fails.
We provide weekly and monthly maintenance programs, full equipment service and repair covering Hayward, Pentair, Jandy, Sta-Rite, and Zodiac systems, and complete pool rescue for pools that have been neglected or left in disrepair. Because we are based in Douglas the same county as Mora service calls are not a logistical stretch for us. The company that built your pool knows your equipment, knows your plumbing layout, and knows your water chemistry history. That continuity is genuinely useful when something goes wrong at 4 PM on a Friday in July.
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