I live in a house with a gorgeous in-ground pool. When my husband and I bought the property in 2012, I swooned over visions of pool parties filled with floaties and endless summer fun.

It’s a good thing I didn’t start sending out those pool party invitations too soon. Because first, we had to figure out how to repair and maintain a swimming pool, which is no small task. Here are a few things I learned about what it takes to have a home with a pool.

Lesson No. 1: Renovating a run-down pool will drain your bank account dry

The home we’d purchased was a distressed property near Seattle that had been empty for years. Thieves had stolen anything they could, including equipment and wiring. My neighbor talked about chasing off groups of teenagers who trespassed onto the empty property and sat around the pool, throwing rocks and bottles into the water. By the time we’d bought the place, the pool water wasn’t just green. It was a menacing green, a black, lumpy morass.

We were about to discover just how expensive and harrowing pool repair can get.

For one, the pool equipment needed to be replaced. A new, energy-efficient heat pump cost $4,500. We bought a pool-cleaning robot for about $800. Just to get the pool running, we spent about $10,000.

It wasn’t just money, either. Because draining a fiberglass pool can cause the shell to shift, we had to actually clean the existing water in the pool rather than draining it. So we spent weeks dragging rubbish and rotting debris out of the murky depths. We evicted hundreds of croaking frogs and salamanders. We cleaned out gallons of pine needle sludge before the pool was even clean enough to start using the pool robot.

The day we could see the bottom of the pool was a long-awaited victory.

Lesson No. 2: Once it’s up and running, swimming pools rock!

And yet: Once all the repairs were done, our first pool party had me hooked! Friends came, and friends of friends. They brought food, and babies, and laughter! It’s a good thing I live in the country, because the shrieking and carrying on would have been heard for blocks away in the city.

I discovered why playing in a home pool is much better than going to a lake or a public pool. I control the temperature, for one thing. (I think 86 degrees is about right.) I test the water myself, so I know the chemicals are all just so. We follow our own rules, with all the floaty toys and basketball games we want.

Lesson No. 3: Even when your pool is fixed, maintenance costs a pretty penny

I’ll admit that my expectations of pool ownership were different from the reality. I had thought that once it was fixed up, we could add a few chemicals and run the pump filters every so often, and spend long, lazy summers lounging by the pool.

First, we live in the Pacific Northwest. So which long, lazy summers? You don’t know how short our summers are until you’re scanning the weather report, looking for enough sunshine to open the pool. I’m lucky if my pool doesn’t look more like this:

Second, pools require a lot of maintenance, and inevitably, repairs. Sometimes we say we should just throw cash in the water, for all the chemicals we buy and dump in the pool. Last year, the pipes sprang a leak, and the summer was half over before it was working again. We spend a significant portion of every summer working on our pool. Last summer, we spent about $500 on repairs, plus another $200 on chemicals.

Victorian architecture is an expression of the “More is more” philosophy of design, producing ornate, intricate homes that resemble giant dollhouses. The style is perennially popular and when preserved properly, results in feature-worthy dwellings.

Victorians were supercharged in the late 1800s by the development of steam-powered sawmills, which could mass-produce wood trim with ornate patterns quickly and cheaply, making complicated designs in bright colors available to everyday Americans.

Many classic Victorians are still standing, in almost every corner of the country. And many of these large vintage homes are deceptively affordable.

We turned up 10 Victorians on the market for less than $300,000—and they aren’t fixer-uppers, either. Many of the homes we’ve highlighted below have been lovingly updated, restored, and preserved, ensuring that these grand dames will have a bright future.

Get ready to dream about stained glass, fancy parlors, and idly sitting on the front porch, watching the carriages roll by.

First American shut down external access to an application on Friday after cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs alerted the title insurer that millions of records were exposed online. 

“The digitized records – including bank account numbers and statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, and drivers license images – were available without authentication to anyone with a Web browser,” Krebs wrote. 

Krebs, widely followed by security experts via his krebsonsecurity.com website, said the documents he accessed included current records as well as data going back to 2003. He said he didn’t know if anyone had accessed the information for criminal purposes.

“As of the morning of May 24, firstam.com was returning documents up to the present day (885,000,000+), including many PDFs and post-dated forms for upcoming real estate closings,” Krebs wrote. “By 2 p.m. ET Friday, the company had disabled the site that served the records. It’s not yet clear how long the site remained in its promiscuous state, but archive.org shows documents available from the site dating back to at least March 2017.”

Krebs posted an image of a record he got from the site related to the sale of a home in Scottsdale, Arizona. The document included Social Security number, mobile phone number, home address, email address and marital status. Krebs redacted that information to protect the seller’s privacy.

There is no evidence the security hole was exploited, First American said in a regulatory filing today. If that changes, the company will notify affected customers and provide credit monitoring services to them, the company said.

“An outside forensic firm has been retained to aid in assessing the extent to which any customer information may have been compromised,” First American said in the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Though the ongoing investigation is in its early stages, at this time there is no indication that any large-scale unauthorized access to sensitive customer information occurred.”

First American set up a web page it said it will use to provide updates on the security breach. Click here to access it.

Ever since Palomar Health decided to close its downtown Escondido campus in 2015, residents have speculated about what would happen to the 13.8-acre property that occupies a prominent spot in the city’s core.

On Monday, residents are invited to attend a meeting to learn about Integral Communities’ proposal to replace the old Palomar Medical Center with a mostly residential housing project.

The project calls for razing everything on the property and building 510 dwelling units and up to 12,000 square feet of commercial space. The proposal is not final and some details likely will change, city officials and the development firm said.

“The project is in the early planning stages and we are responding to comments from the city about its design and makeup,” said Ninia Hammond, a spokeswoman for Integral. “As we get into the infrastructure, grading, site design and product types, we are balancing what is saleable and marketable with construction and site constraints.”

To encourage high-density housing in the urban core, the property is zoned for 100 units per acre, meaning that, theoretically, if the buildings rose high enough and underground parking was constructed, more than 1,200 dwelling units could be built there. But the current plans submitted by Integral call for less than half that number based on what they think will sell best and not be cost-prohibitive to construct.

The “Palomar Heights” project includes three planning areas with a variety of multi-family housing and commercial components.

Residential units would range in size from 600 square feet to almost 2,000 square feet, with parking ranging from 0.70 spaces per dwelling unit to 2.25 spaces per unit.

About 900 surface-level parking spaces are proposed for the site, with additional street parking to be provided on Valley Boulevard.

1. 22501 Beach St., St. Clair Shores, MI

Price: $499,000

Why it’s here: It’s a one-of-a-kind home with a place in rock history: the former home of Patti and Fred Smith. It also happens to be a fully remodeled beauty perched on a lovely canal-front location.

It was built in 1918, and the current owners have updated and improved the home without sacrificing one iota of its historic charm. It still has the original marble and granite floors throughout the main level, an original bookcase secret passage to a hidden wine cellar, and a rooftop terrace. The boathouse has been turned into a speakeasy entertainment space.

Fred “Sonic” Smith, a guitarist with the MC5, and Patti, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, bought the home in 1980 and raised their two kids there. Patti sold it just after Fred’s death in 1994.

Their son, Jackson Smith, is the listing agent. As he told the Detroit News, “I feel really lucky that I had a chance—the owners were so nice—I had a chance to see them really turn it into something spectacular, because what they put into the home is far nicer physically than it ever was when I lived there.”

He added, “When I walk in there, it still looks like the same house I grew up in, but everything has been lovingly cared for. The house has the same life to it that I remember as a kid.”

• The costs of labor and materials have risen significantly in the past two years and continue to rise, due to a construction labor shortage as well as new tariffs on materials.
• If these increased costs are not factored into insurance coverage in disaster-prone areas, homeowners will be left with huge losses that could even resonate through the mortgage market.
• If just 1% of the Southern California homes at risk were a complete loss in a wildfire, given the increase in reconstruction cost over the last two years (5.6%), the undervaluation would be $25 million.

Extreme weather, from floods to wildfires to high-category hurricanes, is causing ever more damage to neighborhoods. Now, new research shows that much of the nation’s housing stock may be underinsured against these disasters.

The cost of rebuilding has risen significantly in the past two years and continues to rise, due to a severe construction labor shortage as well as new tariffs on materials. If these increased costs are not factored regularly into insurance coverage in disaster-prone areas, homeowners will be left with huge losses that could even resonate through the mortgage market.

Open the door to bigger profits.

Home prices are on the rise, climbing another 3% year over year, according to S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20-city home price index from February released this month. Still, that growth is slowing and some experts are predicting that we’re increasingly entering a buyer’s market.

And that means sellers who want to get a premium for their home may have to work for it. So MarketWatch dug into the research and asked experts what really moves the needle to get you a better-than-average price for your home. Here’s what we found.

Time it right. Don’t try to sell your home in winter, but do try to sell it in the spring. Sellers who sold their homes in June — meaning June was the sale date on the deed of the house, so they likely put the home on the market in spring — got 9.2% more than what their home was valued at, according to data released this month from real estate analytics firm ATTOM Data Solutions.

Sellers got a premium in other spring and summer months too: May (7.4%); July (7.3%); April (6.4 %); March (6.1%); August (5.8%); meanwhile December, January and October sellers got less than a 4% premium. ATTOM’s Chief Product Officer Todd Teta says that this is because demand is much higher in spring and summer in part because school is out and winter is over so people are out and about.

And research released this week by Realtor.com on the 50 top housing markets confirms that spring is the best time for listing a home. Indeed, homes listed in the first week of April got 14% more views, had 5% less competition and garnered 6% higher prices. ‘Based on early 2019 data, this could mean an extra $17,000 added to the list price for a typical listing priced just over $306,000 in early April,” the Realtor.com data found. “By listing during the week of March 31 – April 6, sellers are able to take advantage of a sweet spot in the season that offers high buyer demand, less competition, quick home sales, and strong prices,” the analysis revealed.

Pause before you renovate. While you might be tempted to put in a top-of-the-line kitchen or a fresh bathroom, most of the time you don’t recoup the costs of a big-time renovation when you sell, according to a study of 22 major renovations. Indeed, with the two renovations where you recoup the highest percentage of your costs — garage door renovation and manufactured stone veneers — you’re still out of pocket at least $100.

So if your house is in decent condition, you may be financially better off making smaller cosmetic updates that don’t cost much. “If the house has ‘good bones’ — which refers to items like structural integrity, a solid roof, well-functioning windows and sufficient HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) — then upgrading the FF&E [finishes, fixtures and equipment] may be very worthwhile,” says Justin Riordan, interior designer, architect and founder of the Portland-based home staging company Spade and Archer Design Agency. That might include “fresh interior paint, new carpeting, refinishing wood floors, replacing outdated countertops, painting cabinets, and installing new appliances and light fixtures. Recouping the cost of these items is easy provided the bones are good and the house is beautifully staged and presented to potential homebuyers.”