Pool House Design and Build

We’re at Michigan Avenue directly across from Gilson Park in Wilmette and we’re building a pool house for a client that we’ve worked with. This is now our fifth job with them. We’ve built a house next door and now we’re presently building a pool house.

We’re standing in sort of the main area and down below us is the basketball court. Danny’s up on the scaffolding. He’s scared of heights which is sort of hilarious. There’s a screen back there for like a movie theater which can drop down, which is totally cool. It’s going to be ten feet tall, eighteen feet wide. You’ll be able to stand here, on this balcony, and look through what will be a glass railing here, sit on your couch, turn around and watch a movie and literally have be the same exact size as the people on the movie screen.

The staircase into the basement is a steel spine with plate steel. We’re going to be adding three inch timbers over the top of these. The timbers are actually taken from a tree that we took down in the backyard – a silver maple. Those have been slabbed up, dried and finished, and then they’re ready for installation.

In the basement of the pool house, we have a pickleball court option. They’ll also have a volleyball court option and then obviously the basketball court option and then the kids will just be able to run around here on their tricycles, too.

We’re in the mechanical room of the pool house and what we have here is the manifold for the various pieces of the in-floor radiant system. There’s a boiler. We’re going to heat up hot water. We’re going to circulate it through this what’s called a wirsbo quick track, snapped into some plywood. They’ll put tile on top of this and then we’ll transfer the energy from the hot water into the actual tile floor that’s how we heat the building. It’s the most comfortable way to heat a house. It’s expensive but it’s a really efficient way to do it.

So, we’re up on the roof of the pool house and what’s actually kind of interesting is that there’s the house that we built 15 years ago and here’s the pool house for that house on the lot next door but we’re actually going to be tying the landscaping together. They’re still two separate pins but they’re going to act as one piece of property.

The siding next door is interesting – it’s old pickle barrels. You can actually see on some of the boards there’s still a hole where they plugged the hole from the barrel.

So, we’re looking down from the roof of the from the pool out in between us and the pool is a trellis made out of galvanized steel. There’ll be a series of wood pieces in the middle here. It’ll help shade the building as well as the occupants that are sitting out on the patio.

The exterior siding at the pool house is a product called Thermory. It’s actually a reclaimed ash. We can oil it every year and maintain this brown color or we can just let it gray out which is the plan here. It does not degrade the material just letting it go, but this is going to be a gray building in about 9 months.