THE MAGIC!
Water is magic. The way the light sparkles on it or dances on the ceiling due to the slightest ripples. The way it feels on your skin, flows along the body, and lifts you. The sound of water is comforting when it burbles over rocks or trickles over a ledge into a pool. Water is so compelling and yet there is a menace to it.
Water in a pool is a caged lion - beautiful to look at, rippling with energy, scary. People can’t help but reach their hands through the bars to touch. But this animal deserves respect and daily care. If you neglect your duties, or treat her trivially, she will attack by turning the water toxic, leaking out upon your floor, or causing you to wail in frustration with equipment failures. On the other hand, if you learn her ways, she will give you back energy, prolong your life, relieve your stresses, and enrich the precious minutes of you life.
AN INVESTMENT IN YOUR HEALTH!
Water is the best exercise for any person and for any age. Submerged in water to your waist, you weigh half as much. Submerged to your neck, your muscles and skeleton bear only 10% of your body weight. Now that you are lighter, you can begin to exercise without the pounding on your muscles and joints. Swimming offers the trifecta of health - stretching, strengthening, and aerobic exercise all at once. Water gives you a workout while at the same time keeping you cool and feeling clean. And warm water soothes stiff joints, allowing them to limber up as well as relieving the pain of arthritis. I was surprised to learn that swimming increases bone-strength - yet another good reason to make this your lifetime exercise. Want to avoid coronary heart disease? Swim 30 minutes a day. Want to experience a zen-like moment where you lose track of time and come up out of the water feeling like you’ve been away and have to look at the clock to calculate the dimensional time-slip? Swimming is like that when you get into a rhythm of breathing, stroking, and letting the mind solve problems, or wander, or go black.
What I’ve been talking about is an investment in your health. What kind of price do you put on health? Health is wealth. The root word of wealth is weal or well-being. That’s well-BEING not well-HAVING. What good is the money if you cannot enjoy it? Health is wealth and many is the rich but sickly person who would gladly change places with a much poorer but healthy soul. Guard your health. While the “lion in the basement” may provide some stresses early on, they are good stresses. And in the end, you will be relieved of bad stress by frequent visits to the basement.
A SMART SITUATION!
And what about the care and feeding of the beast in the basement? Well, housing a pool in your basement can be very smart and economical when compared to keeping it outside. In the basement, it is protected from harsh weather and freezing temperatures. My basement stayed a fairly stable 55 degrees before I put the pool and hot tub down there. Now, the radiant heat from them keeps the basement at around 65 degrees. I don’t have to heat the basement because I use the heat from the pools three times. Once to heat the pool. Once more to heat the basement, and one last time to heat the floor above the basement. If the hot tub were outside, I’d be heating water, and then the heat would be wasted by going straight into the atmosphere. And where I live, Colorado, we can have weeks of sub-freezing temperatures. No matter how well insulated your hot tub, you can expect that the heater will be running non-stop making your electric meter spin like a fan. Efficient use of energy is one plus, and there are others. In your basement, your water will be protected from the rays of the sun. Sunlight degrades chlorine - making it less able to do its pool-cleaning work. Outside pools require cyanuric acid to stabilize the chlorine, something unnecessary in a basement pool. More chemicals mean more costs. Sunlight also stimulates algae - something you don’t want growing in your pool. You’ll need to chemically shock your pools more often and more chemicals mean more costs. Additionally, winds carrying dust, debris, and leaves will not soil your basement pool or clog its skimmer. Nor will pranksters be able to sneak in and skinny dip, or fill it with dishwasher soap to create a foaming mess.
PRIVACY!
Finally, you will have more privacy in your basement. Where I live, in the suburbs of Denver, my home is surrounded on all sides by other homes and their windows look down upon my back yard. Do I really want to sit there in full view of the neighbors? Will the noise I and my friends make offend them and cause them to have to come speak to me? It has happened to a neighbor of mine who situated her swim-spa on the property line between her and the neighbors. After an evening of mild reveling, she got to meet those neighbors for the very first time when they came over to complain about the noise. Who needs that? Plus, there is nothing for me to look at anyway. The night sky is ruined by light pollution, and the neighbors would just be staring down at me from their windows. The frigid weather would make it a challenge to walk outside in a bathing suit, or come back inside dripping wet. You should shower before entering the pools so that would mean tramping water from your shower through your house and out the door to the pool. This discomfort and inconvenience creates a barrier and must be eliminated. Just put the pool in your basement, along with a bathroom and shower.
Well. Now that I’ve convinced you that this is a worthwhile idea, let me show you how to do it!
I also show you how to make this rather unique concrete bar!
Essential Tools and Resources
You will need to get some reference materials together before you start. Here are the most important things I can tell you.
Manuals and Guides
- Pool Building
The most important piece of information I can give you is to go to this website and buy the information provided there.
http://www.custombuiltspas.com/
I am not affiliated with this website, and I receive no compensation from them. But I did buy the materials from them which supplied me with all the knowledge I needed, coupled with my own skills, to complete my project.
At the time, I think I spent $99 dollars on the instruction guides but the basement cost me $20,000 dollars so it was a very minor purchase. I learned from the documents all about pools and how to build them. It was money well spent.
And Gene, the owner of the website, is a friendly and helpful resource for questions you might have during the construction process. He can also help you with equipment purchases and give you advice on what to buy.
I chose to save a little money and buy used equipment from a local hot tub supply shop. I bought 2 pumps, 1 ladder, 1 filter, and 1 Balboa controller - all used.
- Concrete Countertops
For information about how to build concrete countertops, visit this website:
http://www.concreteexchange.com/
Tools
You should have a full set of basic tools - hammers, screwdrivers, drill bits, pliers, etc. But here are some you might not have:
Wheelbarrow - you’ll use this to mix mortar, primarily.
Hammer Drill - I went through two hammer drills on this project. I worked the first one too hard drilling so many holes in concrete block and it overheated and failed. I was happy, though, with the Harbor Freight quality hammer drills I bought for around $30 dollars each.
String level - it hangs on a string between two points and helps you determine the level.
Chalk Line - a string covered in chalk that lets you leave a straight