This or that

BoatNoob

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So if life is about happiness and pleasure, enjoying time with family and taking time to relax....

£100K on 20+ year old 35-40 footer motor boat
OR
£80-100K on swimming pool & spa in garden
 

Jamie Dundee

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I think you’ll find the boat is far more usable over a 12 month period (or even a 3 month period) than the pool.
 

Seastoke

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So if life is about happiness and pleasure, enjoying time with family and taking time to relax....

£100K on 20+ year old 35-40 footer motor boat
OR
£80-100K on swimming pool & spa in garden
A boat will bring you memories good or bad , if you dont like it you can sell it a pool you can fill it in.
 

Bouba

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A swimming pool is just a boat in reverse (one is to keep water out the other to keep it in). Both are demanding mistresses. Both represent loads of work (especially in the summer when you feel least like doing it). So if you are looking for the easy option, I can’t help, both are a pain. But which gives me the most pleasure ? Undoubtedly the boat. Even when not using it (which is nearly all the time) it gives a pride of ownership, which while has no intrinsic value, is certainly something you won’t get from a pool
 

Martxer

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If you decide you don’t like the boat you can sell it, as seastoke says with a pool you have to fill it in which is a pain.
 

Bouba

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You will be captain of your boat. Try calling yourself captain of the pool??
For a start, there is no need to spend quite so much money on a pool, even a big covered one (of course it can depend on your terrain etc), secondly a pool can be replaced, a trip to the beach, the local municipal pool, jumping off your boat. But a boat is not so easy to replace (to be fair you can rent one, and while prohibitively expensive, is probably a more sensible option for all of us).
A lot depends of the age of the children. If the children/grandchildren are around 5ish, then they can play in the pool all day every day. Teens can have pool parties.
Boats are probably the more selfish option. My advice is to be selfish
 

Alicatt

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Got the pool in the garden and a hot tub too, this year the pool has been used for about 6 days, it has been that wet here I have had to be constantly draining it to stop it overflowing. For what it cost it's been great, next year we are fitting a heat pump to it to supplement the solar panel heating. At the moment we have 12sqm of solar panels to heat 75cu m of water and sometimes that is just not enough. This year we bought a robot to keep the pool clean and boy has that cut down on the work, pop it in the water, turn it on and take it out every hour or so to clean the sand, tree detritus, and dead insects out of it's filter.
Last year we were hardly out of it but it was a lot warmer last summer.
With the old round 5.5m pool the solar panels were more than enough to get it to over 40c, but the new pool is about 3 times the volume.

A boat is in our planning, but not this year.

The hot tub I'm dismantling and going to cut up and dispose of it at the recycle park, I've pinched one of the pumps from the hot tub to use as a circulation pump for the pool while I await new bearings arriving for the pool pump, the pool pump is around 12 years old now.
 

Bouba

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I will say this much, during the first (and strictest) lockdown, we were very grateful that we had a pool.
 

GravyStain

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Finished an indoor pool recently. Not huge, 24ftx 12ft so perfectly adequate. Cost me £45k all in. Tied it into the house so access easy all year round. They ARE a pain in the bum, and like a boat, they need regular looking after. Expect a leccy bill of £100 a month and a chemical bill of £50 a month (all approximate obviously).

It is used every day by me, the wife and our 6 year old who now thinks I'm the best thing since sliced bread.

I should say at 45k, I did 70 percent of the work myself, and the rest with a friend. If you get a contractor in it will cost probably 20k more...

Is it a boat? No
Can it replace a boat? No
But build it right and it will serve you all year round.

Do I wish it was a boat? Yes!
 

Bouba

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One bit of advice. When you think of how deep a pool is, you think it’s the depth of the water. But when the pool salesman talks about how deep a pool is, he means from the lip of the pool to the bottom. And that could make it nearly a foot shallower than you were expecting
 

Bouba

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There could be some inbuilt bias going on here. As an experiment go to a pool forum and pose the same question. It’s quite possible that the boat will come second
 

BruceK

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I come from a land where near every suburban house included a pool. Where did we swim most? In the sea. I dont miss a pool at all I havent swum in a pool in the 20 odd years I've resided here. And frankly the British weather is simply not suited to it regardless of the pool being warmed or not. As the saying goes.... only Englishmen and mad dogs...
 
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