Well, it is with a great sigh of relief that I can say that the swimming pool has been contracted and digging should start Friday. For a while there it looked like it would be added to the “next phase” which I found very hard to come to terms with.
I sound very spoilt, with that huge beach right there, but the fact is that for health (and personal preference) reasons the only exercise that is really great for me is swimming. Also, working at home in a relatively isolated location, I was counting on my daily swim or swims… Our beach, well, it’s great for splashing about, body-surfing, etc., but way too rough for any swimming. Anyway, yes, it’s the one extravagance I am really into, the pool. Not jewelry, not expensive travel, not plastic surgery or botox shots. Just the pool.
So my Mom -- who apparently is good friends with EVERYONE -- managed some sort of agreeable deal with the leading swimming pool company, Piscinas del Este, and yesterday I received an email from Fabián enquiring which color glass tiles we would want. I was delighted, because for cost reasons I thought we would have to go with the painted cement rather than tiling, but apparently the paint requires annual re-painting, so the US$1,600 price difference for our size pool is well worth it.
We decided on dark blue glass tiles. The other option we like is white. But the white looks a bit dirty, and does not look white in the end… (see pictures here with white glass tiles) We don´t want turquoise or light blue…
We have also decided to acknowledge the sloping nature of our land and put the pool in a slightly lower level, maybe 40 to 45cm (1.5 feet) and build a low retaining wall on the side facing our house and the street -- much like what you see around the pool pictured above and below, but white rather than in stone -- with a couple of steps leading on to the pool level. Otherwise we will be required to fill more and more area to remain at the level of the house, and eventually the land will fall more sharply anyway, which is not good. So a terraced approach seems sensible and will look nice. We can use the little wall as seating even.
The pictures here are from a house that Fabian renovated a couple of years ago, especially all the landscaping, pool, etc. It’s not our style (this is what in Uruguay they call “colonial”), but I still think the pool is gorgeous, and it happens to be exactly double the size of ours. Ours will be 3mx14m (10x46 feet) and the one pictured here is 6mx14m or 20x46 feet. So the other conclusion is that our pool will look almost like a ribbon, thin and long. Well, basically two lanes… The depth will be 1.40m (4.6 feet) throughout, so we can do water-aerobics type exercises.
We will eventually surround part of the pool with a wooden deck, but we still have to figure out how and where it meets the lawn, how we landscape around it, etc… That’s probably a couple months off at least, anyway…
The rendering below is just one of many drafts from when we were debating whether to do an indoor pool (that "annex" structure seen to the right of the house), versus the outdoor pool. The indoor pool cost as much as building a new house, so we killed it, and also decided that the pool will be aligned with the axis of our bedrooms (the two large windows facing the pool, which means it will be positioned further down on the plot than what is seen on the rendering. 
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Swimming pool, what color glass tiles?
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4 comments:
A couple of days ago I noticed you had a blog.. took me until today to get to it. I like your writing style, so I thought I'd do some reading... then I found a lot of the blog is about the house.. one of my hobbies... so I have a few things to add...
1. You mention glass tiles... we pulled out our old fiberglass pool in Piria last week and are building an inground, concrete pool, similar to your construction. We also considered painting vs. tiling. We went with tile too... for similar reaosns to yours. In Canada, we'd repaint an outdoor pool once every 8 years... didn't know how often it would be here, but I'd prefer not to paint... With tiles we had 2 choices. Glass or ceramic. We were told told that glass is poorer quality. That ceramic lasts longer or something like that. Anyway, we went with ceramic. Did your pool guys say that to you? Perhaps my guys were milking the gringo :)
Indoor pool DOES cost the same as a house -pretty much. I built a few of them in my day. Stunning, beautiful, and the more you spent on it, the more stunning/beautiful they were.
Had you ever considered building a much smaller, interior lap pool, using water jet injection... the pumps aren't cheap.. but because they're so small, and the climate here is so mild, it wouldn't cost that much...
Of course, an outdoor pool is much prettier and if you therminsulate your pool and put in a heatpump, you could use it probably 10 months of the year.
Urufish,
I never considered the ceramic tiles because I have always been in love with the little glass mosaic-type tiles. But nobody mentioned ceramic either.
I have thought about the endless pool all my life. At some point I had a picture of it pinned to the wall of my cubicle, as something to strive for :-) But when I looked into pricing recently, it looked like with taxes and all it would cost a small fortune also, (around $30k) so it's on hold.
Rethought the glass/ceramic thing yesterday.. Ur right.. the little glass mosaics are nicer. What I should have said is there are two qualities of those. interior and exterior. You're dealing with a pro pool company. I'm sure they're putting the exterior tiles in. Those are the ones we went with. My wife said the selection of mosaics here in ceramic wasn't good. And she wants a design in the bottom which you can only get here in glass, pre-made.
You talk about an endless pool. Are you talking about the 'zero horizon' pools (that's what we call them in Canada). The ones where the water goes right to the top and it seems to drop into nowhere? That's why they call them endless or zero horizon????
You should have priced it out. If you've got a natural slope, it would play perfectly into that side of the pool... make it look like a waterfall. I was surprised that here in Uruguay, this is really being promoted by the pool companies in Carrasco. We rarely see it in Toronto.
The practical effect is that the water must go to teh top off the pool because there is no skimmer. The returns are usually placed in the bottom of the pool shooting water upwards where it makes its way to the top and then spills over the sides through plastic filters which surround the pool to trap leaves, then through finer mesh and then into the return and sand, etc. This does a much better job of keeping the pool itself clean. I was going to ask you what your plans were for that? A kreepy krawly? The thing that runs around the pool bottom several hours a day, cleaning up the sand you're gonna get and the other debris? Or do you plan to keep it covered and only open it when you use it? With the endless pool, you could keep it open most of the time and the dirt/debris would be sucked over the side.
Anyway, our architect convinced us to go with this design for Piria because a) its dug into solid granite and we couldn't get the extra 60cm we needed for a traditional skimmer without dynamite and b) it's a small pool and only added USD$1K to the price tag.
If you're in love with an endless pool, get pricing and if it's too high, ask your architect would you could do now to make it easier/more cost efficient to change it later.
The actual prefabricated equipment used for the channeling that goes on the side of a real endless pool supposedly isn't avaialble here in Uruguay (or it's so expensive, they dont want to sell it to me), so the local labourers will make the channels themselves.
Let's see, I think we're talking about two different things. The "infinite" pool is the one where the water runs over the border. The endless pool is the one where you swim against an adjustable jet of water that enables one to swim laps in a very short pool, as you are always in the same spot, like a swimming treadmill. That was the object of my desire, but as I said, apparently too expensive to import.
The infinite pool is a very nice concept, and had we not changed decisions mid way I would have wanted it that way. We were going to have decking surrounding the pool, then I decided I don't want decking on all sides, and as it turns out, there is a slight inclination that would have made the perfect waterfall.
Maybe we can still do that later, at greater cost, I know, but right now I'm too broke to get into any serious landscaping stuff. I'm just ecstatic to have the pool at all :-)
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