Читать книгу How to Build a Pool and Hot Tub in your Basement - Adrian Martin - Страница 7

TIME TO VISUALIZE!

Design tools like Google Sketchup are great at allowing you to virtually play with the space you have to work with. But no tool is as powerful as your mind so you will want to spend time in your basement visualizing. You and others should walk around the unfinished space and pretend to be entering a hot tub or pool. Lay on the floor and stretch your arms and legs out both forward and side to side. Do you have enough room or are you hitting walls with your feet or fingers? Are ceilings low in one area and high in another? Where are your windows? Can you maximize natural light falling on the water? I used blue tape or scrap wood on the floor to mark out potential walls and then walked around pretending they were there and trying to figure out how they felt. Sit in one area and look towards the rest of the room and pretend to be in the hot tub. How is the view? How is the ventilation? You will want air to easily circulate through the room and around the pools. If you have windows at opposite corners of the room, try not to enclose them or block them. The cross ventilation they afford will be valuable at venting moist air out of your basement and keeping it dry and smelling fresh.

Yes, I spent quite a bit of “design time” simply taking long walks during my lunch hour and letting the brain work on the challenges. I would entertain an idea and then find all the things wrong with it and then try out a new idea. After a while, I would settle on one plan which I would write down in a notebook. Sometimes I would paste ideas to the wall in the basement in the approximate location where I expected them to be. This is useful for planning out where doors, outlets and switches might be located.

I did all the plumbing, framing, drywall, and equipment set up myself. I hired a very good electrician to do all the electrical work according to code. I was able to hand him my lighting plan (which was shown in the previous chapter) and he interpreted it according to the building code, making adjustments where necessary. For example, he moved the location of an outlet near the swim spa, and also placed the switches for lights and ceiling fans out of reach of anybody in the water - for safety.

WHAT IS YOUR THEME?

My wife and I envisioned the basement as a spa-room. A place where one could go to relax, read, watch tv, or exercise and become recharged. Our basement theme was “elemental” - stone, wood, fire, metal, plants, and water. We didn’t want any plastic down there. Nor did we want a bedroom or a movie-room or a game room. In addition to the hot tub and swim spa, I envisioned an area with a cafe table and two chairs, a bar, an exercise area with treadmill, bicycle, and elliptical, and flat-screen television mounted on the wall with several chairs or a couch for viewing. These pieces of furniture required some careful thought on where to place them, how close they could be to each other, what requirements they had for electrical, and how to keep them from taking over all the valuable floor space. I really wanted to maximize floor space. I did not want a cramped and cluttered basement.

HUMAN FACTORS

Before you start building is an excellent time to think about human factors like safety and accessibility. How are people going to get in and out of your pools? Unless you sink them into the ground so they are at floor level, people will have to climb up and into them. Is there enough height between the top of the pool and the ceiling for someone to do this? Are handrails necessary? Another important question can be asked a couple of ways. ”How deep are your pools?” can also be queried, “How high are your pool walls?” Even with generous 8 foot ceilings in most of the basement, Sketchup showed me that if I wanted a swim-spa depth of 4 feet deep, I would have this very tall 4 foot wall extending across the basement, leaving only a 4 foot distance between the pool coping and ceiling. This meant someone would have to crouch to get in and out or else they would hit the ceiling. It looked bad, and I knew it would feel claustrophobic to be swimming so close to the ceiling. Plus, the danger of having the lights so close to the water surface - you don’t want someone to be tempted to change a light-bulb while standing in the pool! The obvious option was to make the pool shallower, but I really wanted the maximum depth I could get because it opened up the option of doing water-aerobics, water-walking and water-running. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get around this problem! Time for another walk at lunch.