If your pool is over five years old, it needs some tweaking. Nothing major, just a little bit of updating. If your pool is over ten years old, it might need some enhancements. If your pool is over fifteen years old, you might be in for needing some major remodeling.

Minor tweaks to your pool are like changing your bed spread every once in awhile when you're tired of staring at the same thing every day. You change what the room looks like, sometimes drastically, without having to spend very much money or buy a new bed.

Quick tweaks for your pool can include putting a few potted plants out around it, changing the lounge chairs--or even just moving the furniture around and throwing away any really cheap plastic furniture that chips after the first year and isn't strong enough to hold anything heavier than a bottle of sun screen. (You're all out there nodding your heads and you know it!)

Tweaking your pool is easy if you have a few bucks to spend on new furniture, and you should update the general look of your pool every few years, just to make it look better.

Every ten years or so, you should do a safety update. Put in a little more time and effort to make sure that your pool is up to speed with current developments, and more importantly, that the wiring in the pool lights and heaters and surfaces haven't been damaged.

Old pools need to be refreshed every now and again. Old tile can crack and rot, making it grimy and unpleasant, even if it's cleaned frequently. Changing the tiling or replacing the tile with a different surface protects people from cutting themselves when it chips--and also creates the "shiny object syndrome" for your family, so they'll all want to be out in the new/old pool again.

Resurfacing the area around the pool should also be done every ten years, if not more frequently. Adding more sand to the concrete surface helps prevent skidding. Covering it with a weather-safe rubber surface can help as well--and will drastically change what your yard looks like, adding to the fun.

Every fifteen to twenty years, or when you move into a house with an fifteen or twenty year old pool, it's time to look into full-blown remodel. Here's the magic of remodeling your pool:

Your pool has a drain that is hooked up to the city.

Your pool has a faucet that is hooked up to the city.

Your pool has electrical wiring that is hooked up to the city.

Those three things need to stay where they are. Other than that, with the right contractors, the sky is the limit. They can also expand where the faucet is so you can get a fountain.

There's the standard stuff like slides and diving boards. If your pool is deep enough, do it. If your pool isn't deep enough, then diving boards are not safe.

Put up walls around your pool. Put in artistic tiling patterns. Put waterfalls in. Put in anything you'd like. Hot tub attachments. Updated heaters. Solar heaters.

If you're really going to splurge on your pool, anything you want is out there, just waiting for your imagination to tap into it.