I’ve worked at Countrywide Pools for years. I’ve sold pools, I’ve quoted pools, I’ve written the captions, I’ve told customers about all the benefits a backyard pool brings to a family in regional WA. Less screen time. More outdoor living. Kids sleeping better. Family connection. The whole lot.
And to be really honest, half the time it felt like a line. The kind of thing you say because you genuinely believe it, but you can’t fully back up because you haven’t lived it yourself.
Then last year, we put a pool in at our own place.
And everything I’d been saying for years to customers turned out to be true. All of it. I just didn’t fully understand how true until I watched it happen in my own backyard, with my own daughter, in real time.
Breaking the usual routine
Before the pool went in, our afternoons looked the same as a lot of country families’ do. School pickup, drive home, snacks, screens, dinner, bed. By 4pm everyone had scattered through the house in different rooms doing different things on different devices.
Now after school pick up, the bag gets dropped at the back door, and she’s in the water before I’ve even put the kettle on. I haven’t had to wrangle her. I haven’t had to negotiate screen time. She just goes outside. For hours. On a Monday. On a Tuesday. On a Wednesday. Not just on weekends or holidays.
That’s the bit that caught me off guard. Not the swimming. The shift in the whole afternoon.
Dinner becomes an outdoor thing
Once she’s in the pool, the rest of us naturally drift out there too. The barbecue gets fired up. I bring drinks out. The dog comes and lies near the gate. And dinner stops being a sit-down-at-the-table-then-back-to-screens kind of affair, and starts being a poolside thing where she eats in her bathers, soaking wet, and the conversation goes for an hour longer than it used to.
It sounds simple. But if you’ve sat through years of dinner-then-everyone-on-their-phones, watching it shift into outside-eating-talking-laughing time is something else.
She eats better. She sleeps better. She’s a different kid in summer.
This is the bit I genuinely wasn’t expecting.
My daughter used to be a snacker. Constantly. Half an apple here, a handful of crackers there, hungry for nothing in particular but never properly hungry for a meal. Dinner was a negotiation most nights. “Just three more bites.” “Try the vegies.” The whole performance.
Since the pool, she eats. Like, properly eats. She gets in the water after school, swims around for an hour, comes out absolutely starving, and demolishes dinner without anyone needing to say a word. Full plates. Vegies and all. Then she’s back in the pool for another lap before bed.
And the sleep. I cannot believe the difference in her sleep. She’s in bed by 8pm and out cold by five past. None of the usual stalling. None of the “I’m not tired”. She’s burning so much energy through the afternoon and evening that by the time she’s in bed she’s done.
I’ve told customers for years that a pool gets kids outside, burning energy, off screens. I always meant it. But I didn’t fully appreciate what “burning energy” actually does to a kid until I watched my own daughter eat a full meal, fall asleep within minutes, and wake up the next morning ready to do it all again. Now I fully back this in!
The screens lose, without me having to make a rule about it
I didn’t put a pool in because I’d read a study about screen time. But the screen thing has been one of the biggest changes I’ve noticed.
The iPad still exists at our place. But it’s stopped being the default. A kid who can choose between a screen and a pool will, most of the time, choose the pool. Not always. But enough that I’m not standing in the kitchen having the daily negotiation about devices anymore.
And the funny thing is, I’m off my phone more too. Because someone has to be watching. So instead of scrolling while she’s on the iPad in the loungeroom, I’m sitting near the pool with a cup of tea and a book. Or I’m actually talking to her about her day while she does laps and tries to convince me to come in.
It’s given me back our afternoons. Not in some big dramatic way. Just in the small, quiet, everyday way of our house feeling lighter and more alive.
Why a pool hits different out here
A pool in a Perth suburb is one thing. A pool on a country property is something else entirely.
Out here, the views go on for kilometres. The sky goes pink before the sun drops. The dog’s got room to lose his mind. And in the middle of all that, you’ve got your kid doing bombs into the deep end while you’re standing on the lawn with a cold one watching the property in front of you.
That’s a country thing. It just doesn’t hit the same in town.
Over the years I’ve watched our team install pools in some pretty spectacular settings across regional WA, from Northam to Esperance, from the Wheatbelt out through the Mid West, on properties near Wagin, Kellerberrin, Toodyay and everywhere in between. Different soil, different access, different shires, different views out the back. But the moment a family steps into their new pool for the first time and looks around at their own property from the water, it’s the same look on everyone’s face.
I get it now. It’s the moment you realise you didn’t need a holiday. You just needed the water in the right spot.
The practical bit, because I still work for a pool company!
If you’ve read this far and you’re starting to picture what a pool would actually look like at your place, the practical questions usually come next.
What size pool suits a family of four or five? How does the install work on a clay site? What’s the realistic timeline? What’s it going to cost once everything is properly accounted for?
Those are the bits our team handles every day. Countrywide Pools is Northam-based and we’ve been installing fibreglass pools across regional WA for more than 20 years. We service from Exmouth to Esperance and most places in between, and we genuinely understand the difference between a metro install and a rural one. Long transport runs, hard country ground, rock, clay, shire approvals, access challenges, the lot.
We quote realistically upfront so the number on the page is the number you actually pay. No hidden “plus, plus, plus” allowances that quietly inflate the job. Have a look through our range of family-friendly fibreglass pools, see what other families have built on properties like ours in our project gallery, or read what our clients say about working with the team.
But the pool itself is honestly the easy part. The bit nobody can put on a quote is the rest of it. The afternoons that stretch into evenings. The kid who eats her dinner without being asked. The summer that finally feels like summer at home.
If you’re sitting on the fence about a pool for your own property out here, all I can say is, every single thing I used to think might be marketing fluff turned out to be exactly what happens. You just have to put one in to believe it. Let’s talk about your vision — contact us to get started.
