Hear from Our Customers
Tift County summers don’t ease in they arrive hard and stay long. From April through October, you’ve got roughly seven months where a pool isn’t a luxury, it’s the most-used space on your property. That’s the reality of living in South Georgia, and a well-built gunite pool is one of the few home investments that pays you back every single week of that season.
Phillipsburg homeowners are also sitting on real long-term equity potential. Property values in this community have room to grow, and a custom inground pool adds approximately 7% to your home’s value at completion. In a neighborhood where Tift County is actively investing the $1.92 million infrastructure grant awarded in January 2026 for flooding, streets, and water systems is proof of that putting money into your property isn’t a gamble. It’s a read of where things are heading.
What gunite gives you that other pool types don’t is permanence. A properly engineered concrete shell, built with the right rebar spacing and wall thickness for South Georgia’s sandy loam and clay subsoil, doesn’t shift, crack, or fail on you after a heavy rain. The cracking you’ve heard about comes from builders who didn’t account for local soil behavior not from the material itself. Done right, a gunite pool in this climate lasts 30 to 50 years with standard care.
We’re based in Douglas, GA, and have been building custom inground pools across South Georgia since 2014. But our founding team didn’t start there we brought more than 30 years of hands-on experience in concrete, plumbing, and pool construction before Deep Waters Pools ever opened its doors. That history matters when you’re building in Tift County, where the ground doesn’t always cooperate and where a builder without real regional experience can cost you far more than they quoted.
Every pool we build is handled entirely in-house excavation, rebar, gunite application, plumbing, electrical, surface finishing, and equipment installation. No subcontractors at any phase. That’s not a marketing line; it’s how we’ve operated since day one, because it’s the only way to hold a consistent standard from start to finish.
Phillipsburg is an unincorporated community, which means your permits run through Tift County’s building and zoning process not the City of Tifton’s permitting office. We handle that distinction as a matter of routine. We pull every permit, manage every required inspection, and handle the county-level process so you don’t have to track it.
It starts with a site evaluation not a sales visit. Before anything is designed or priced, our team looks at your specific property: drainage patterns, soil conditions, existing utility lines, and any factors that affect how the build needs to be engineered. In Phillipsburg specifically, where county engineers have already documented flooding and drainage challenges in the neighborhood, this step isn’t optional. It’s where the real work begins.
From there, you get a 3D design rendering of your pool before a single shovel touches your yard. You’ll see the shape, depth, features, and finish exactly what you’re approving before construction starts. Once the design is locked and permits are pulled through Tift County, excavation begins. Our crew sets rebar, applies the gunite shell, runs plumbing and electrical, and finishes the surface all in-house, all on one timeline, with no handoffs to outside crews.
The final phase covers equipment installation, safety cover fitting, and a full walkthrough of your system before the project is considered complete. We install and service Hayward, Pentair, Jandy, Sta-Rite, and Zodiac equipment, which means the same company that built your pool can service it in year five, year ten, and beyond. One relationship. One number to call.
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A Deep Waters Pools gunite pool build is a full-scope project from the ground up. That means the 3D design, site evaluation, excavation, rebar and concrete shell, plumbing, electrical, surface finishing, equipment installation, and custom safety cover are all part of the build handled by one crew under one roof. The electrical work is bonded and grounded to NEC Article 680, the federal safety standard for swimming pools. That’s not a detail most builders volunteer, but it’s the standard we build to on every project.
For Phillipsburg homeowners, the in-house permitting piece is particularly important. Because Phillipsburg is an unincorporated CDP within Tift County, all permits go through the county not the City of Tifton. Builders who don’t know that distinction can stall your project waiting on the wrong office. We navigate Tift County’s building and zoning process directly, pulling your building permit, electrical permit, and scheduling every required inspection without putting that burden on you.
Beyond new construction, we also handle pool restoration and ongoing maintenance for existing pools including pools built by other contractors. If you’re in Phillipsburg and your current pool has become more of a headache than a backyard asset, that’s a call we take seriously too.
This is probably the most important question a Phillipsburg homeowner can ask, and it deserves a straight answer. Gunite pools crack when they’re engineered without accounting for local soil behavior not because gunite is a flawed material. In Tift County, where the ground is a mix of sandy loam over clay subsoil and where Phillipsburg’s flooding issues have been significant enough to warrant a $1.92 million state infrastructure grant, soil movement and water saturation are real factors that have to be built around, not ignored.
A properly engineered gunite shell with the right rebar spacing, adequate wall thickness, and structural design based on the actual soil profile of your property handles South Georgia ground conditions without cracking. We begin every Phillipsburg build with a site evaluation that looks specifically at drainage patterns and soil conditions before any design is finalized. That’s how you build a pool that lasts 30 to 50 years in this climate, rather than one that gives you problems in year three.
For a custom gunite pool in the Tifton and Tift County area, most residential builds fall in the $75,000 to $150,000 range depending on size, shape, features, and finish selections. Pools with added features like tanning ledges, water features, custom decking, or specialty finishes will land toward the higher end of that range. A straightforward custom build with standard equipment and a clean design can come in closer to the lower end.
What’s worth understanding is that the lowest bid in this market is rarely the best financial decision. A pool that cracks, delaminations, or fails equipment prematurely because of a rushed build or subcontracted work ends up costing significantly more to fix than the savings on the front end. In Phillipsburg, where a pool represents a meaningful investment relative to current property values, getting the build right the first time matters more than shaving a few thousand dollars off the quote. We provide transparent, itemized pricing so you know exactly what you’re paying for before anything is signed.
A standard custom gunite pool build in Tift County runs approximately 8 to 14 weeks from permit approval to completion, depending on the complexity of the design, weather conditions, and inspection scheduling. The permitting phase which in Phillipsburg runs through Tift County’s building and zoning department typically adds a few weeks before construction can begin, so total timeline from first consultation to first swim is often closer to 3 to 4 months.
The strategic move for Phillipsburg homeowners is to start the process in fall or early winter. Permit queues are shorter, crews have more availability, and a pool that breaks ground in October or November is typically ready before the following April swimming season begins. Starting in spring, when everyone else is calling, means you’re competing for crew time and inspection slots during the busiest stretch of the year. Getting ahead of that calendar is one of the simplest ways to protect your timeline.
Because Phillipsburg is an unincorporated community a Census Designated Place within Tift County rather than an incorporated city your pool permits are pulled through Tift County’s building and zoning department, not through the City of Tifton’s permitting office. That’s a distinction that matters practically: the two offices operate on different processes, different inspection schedules, and different administrative timelines. A builder who doesn’t know which office to work with can cost you weeks before construction even starts.
At minimum, a gunite pool build in this area requires a building permit and an electrical permit. Electrical work must comply with NEC Article 680, which governs bonding and grounding for swimming pools and is a state and federal safety requirement. We handle every permit and every required inspection in-house for every build you don’t track paperwork, schedule inspectors, or navigate the county office. That’s part of the job, not an add-on.
Both are legitimate options, but they serve different priorities. Fiberglass pools come pre-formed in factory shapes, install faster, and require less surface maintenance over time. If you want a pool in a standard shape with a quick turnaround, fiberglass is worth considering. The tradeoff is that you’re choosing from a fixed catalog of shapes and sizes there’s no custom design, no freeform layout, and no ability to build something that fits your specific backyard rather than the other way around.
Gunite gives you a completely custom structure any shape, any depth, any configuration built specifically for your property and engineered for your soil conditions. In Tift County, where lot sizes and drainage patterns vary and where the ground requires site-specific engineering decisions, that flexibility matters. Gunite also has a lifespan of 30 to 50 years with standard care, making it the stronger long-term investment for a homeowner who plans to stay in their home and build equity over time. The surface requires replastering every 10 to 15 years not the 3 to 7 years some fiberglass advocates claim, which applies only to poorly built shells, not quality construction.
Yes. We handle equipment service and pool restoration for pools built by other contractors, not just our own builds. If you’re in Phillipsburg or anywhere in the Tift County area and your current pool has failing equipment, surface issues, or problems that the original builder either can’t or won’t fix, that’s exactly the kind of call we take. We service Hayward, Pentair, Jandy, Sta-Rite, and Zodiac equipment five of the most common brands in residential pools so the work isn’t limited to one manufacturer’s lineup.
Roughly one in four pool owners regrets who built their pool. Some of those homeowners end up with green water, delaminating surfaces, or equipment that fails well before its expected lifespan and no clear path to getting it resolved. We’ve seen those situations across South Georgia and have the technical depth to diagnose and fix them. If your pool has become a problem instead of a backyard asset, it’s worth a conversation before you assume the damage is permanent or the cost is prohibitive.
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