ometimes making two halves into a whole isn’t easy.
Just ask pool builder Ron Aveta.
Aveta became involved in a project for clients who had wildly different requests: The wife wanted a formal pool, the husband wanted a more natural look and the kids just wanted to have fun. Plus, the family members had their hearts set on swimming long laps, but there wasn’t enough buildable area in the backyard for a full-sized vessel. And despite the cold Northeastern winters, they wanted to swim all year long.
The architect, James Pagano, tackled all of these concerns by extending the pool only 20 feet outside and enclosing 22 feet of it in the home. The architect also wanted to remove a wall of the home to create a wide-open space between the indoor and outdoor portions of the pool.
Taking the pool inside would provide more swimming space and allow the clients to have their stylistic wishes met: The indoor portion would have the wife’s formal theme, while the outdoor area would satisfy the husband and children with its rock grotto and waterfall. With this setup, the family could also swim year ’round.
Of course, it hinged on Aveta figuring out how to make it all work.
“There was a lot of homework done on this pool, a lot of borrowing from a lot of different industries,” says Aveta, owner of Creative Master Pools in Franklin Lakes, N.J.
First off, with indoor/outdoor pools being so rare, Aveta didn’t have much collective industry knowledge to rely on. He also had to solve four major problems:
1. How would he seal off the airspace between the inside of the home and the outside of the home during cold winter months?
2. How would he seal off the water between the indoor and outdoor pool during the winter?
3. How would he create a security barrier between the indoor and outdoor pool during the summer that could be easily put up and taken back down?
4. How would he cover the indoor and outdoor pools to make them safe and free from debris?
Cold comfort
To solve the first problem, Aveta and the architect decided to take a page from commercial buildings that use industrial-sized “pocket” sliding glass doors. As the name implies, these doors each have their own track and slide into a wall pocket. When closed, they form a tight vertical seal against the weather.
“That’s the only way it would work well without having swinging doors that would take up large areas. They’re all neatly back in a pocket and a proven industrial door that’s made to work day in and day out in any weather,” Aveta says.
The next problem — how to seal off the water between the indoor pool and the outdoor pool during winter — took more thought.
The divider had to be sturdy enough to prevent break-ins and withstand return kicks from lap swimmers in the indoor portion.
Plexiglas was the material of choice. “We were going to use sheeted PVC, but we chose Plexiglas so the light would come through in wintertime,” Aveta says.
The Plexiglas only comes in 8-foot lengths, however, and the pool would be 10 feet wide where it transitioned from inside to out. To accommodate the difference, Aveta designed what he calls “knee walls” — small gunite sections jutting out from the side of the pool 1 foot on either side.
A 1-inch gutter between the indoor and outdoor pool would hold the Plexiglas in place and seal the two pools off from one another. The only downside is that the heavy glass would have to be physically installed and removed each season.
Aveta also needed to devise a horizontal, airtight seal 10 inches high and 10 feet long, to go between the Plexiglas pool wall and the sliding glass doors during winter. So he decided to outfit the winter pool wall with a gasket on top.
But first he’d have to create the gasket.
He did so by cutting a sheet of PVC to fit the space. Then he attached aluminum U channels on the top and bottom of the PVC. The bottom channel would clamp down on the Plexiglas wall, while the top created a tight fit under the glass door. Finally, to finish the seal he epoxyed a strip of durable closed-cell foam rubber on the top U channel. The sliding glass doors would butt up against the foam rubber, forming a complete seal.
Taking cover
Next came the tougher question: How could the clients easily secure the indoor pool from the outdoor pool during summer? Unlike the winter Plexiglas wall, this barrier needed to be easily put up and taken down.
“Just finding something that would go up and down and give it security from indoor to outdoor was the hard issue,” Aveta says.
So he hit the phones and the Internet. He researched the bulkheads used to divide commercial pools for multiple uses, but found that option was much too expensive.
He considered just installing an automatic cover vertically. “But it could easily be torn for access into the house,” Aveta says. “We thought we were stymied.”
Then he went to NESPA’s Atlantic City Pool & Spa Show. There, he saw a floating cover made of hollow plastic slats filled with air. Rather than relying on a track to carry it from one side of the pool to the other, this cover worked on buoyancy. If locked in place, the slats could provide as sturdy a barrier as a glass window, Aveta reckoned. “This way, we have something that’s fairly rigid and not easy for someone to break through,” he says.
He would install the cover on a reel underground, and have it rise the 4 feet from the floor to the top of the pool to form a vertical barrier. “There’s a pocket in the floor of the pool and that holds the reel and the cover,” Aveta says. “Over that pocket is a grate with a slot to allow the cover to come out and up into the tracks. There’s only a 1-inch slot, so there are no safety concerns.”
The cover motor would sit in a manhole next to the pool, so service technicians could maintain it. Aveta’s crews would set decking stone on the metal manhole cover to conceal it.
Buoyancy would lift the cover from the floor to the top of the pool, and the temporary wall would retract when the reel coiled it back in.
But Aveta needed some kind of tracking system to anchor the cover on either side so it would stay put. That way, he says, “There’s a little bit of flex, but it locks into the tracks, so it can’t be pulled out. It would be harder to get through that than it would be to break through a glass window.”
Fortunately, he already had some expertise with sheet metal that he could put to use to make this track system. The base for the track system was a 1-inch-wide, stainless steel U channel. He attached the channel to the pool by epoxying stainless steel studs to the gunite.
Next, he had to attach the slatted cover to the track. The cover would move along the track. Stainless steel flanges at the track’s opening would guide the slats into the narrow channel.
One more problem had to be solved: how to make the indoor pool safe and debris-free when not in use. The obvious solution was an automatic cover. Crews concealed the cover box with bluestone set on a system of stainless steel angle irons and bracings. Outside, a removable safety fence would protect the homeowners’ children during summer, while a winter cover would seal the pool during the cold.
The great intersection
Once Aveta had all his solutions figured out, another potential problem presented itself: All of the solutions — the pocket doors, automatic cover, floating pool wall and Plexiglas pool wall — would intersect where the pool transitions from indoors to outdoors.
That meant everything had to work together seamlessly.
“We had to make sure they would all meet perfectly at the T,” he says. “And we had to make sure the Plexiglas would fit correctly in the same track as the floating wall.”
To see how it would all fit, Aveta fabricated a mock-up out of wood to simulate a section where temporary wall or Plexiglas door, automatic cover and sliding glass doors meet. That showed him an immediate problem: He was trying to fit a 3-inch Plexiglas sheet into the same track as a cover with 1-inch slats.
With the mock-up, he calculated that he would have to bevel down the corners of the edges until they were only 1 inch thick.
The mock-up also helped him figure out where to place the automatic cover track.
In real time
With the closing-off system in place, construction went smoothly, for the most part.
When Aveta’s crews started excavation, they discovered something fairly daunting: The whole neighborhood was graded to drain onto this property, causing severe groundwater conditions there. “We could tell there were water problems, but we didn’t know they were as bad as they were,” Aveta says. “Of course, this was before our drought, so we had a tremendous amount of rain that year, which just added to the problem.”
In New Jersey, all property drainage plans must be drawn up by a licensed engineer. In this case, the professional specified a 5-foot base of 2-1/2-inch crushed stone to allow drainage and reach bedrock. A network of drains would carry water to the sewer system. Aveta’s crews needed to stabilize the excavation so they could place the stone bed.
“We actually had pumps running 24 hours a day after we trucked the silt out, to pump the water out and allow us to get the stone base in on a stable ground. From there, it got a little easier,” he says.
Just rewards
Looking back on the project now, Aveta says he sees it as a prime example of how ingenuity can solve a seemingly unsolvable problem.
“We like to show people what we’re capable of doing,” he says. “It was one of those projects where everybody said, ‘You can’t do that.’
“But we did it. One of the worst things you can say to me is that I can’t do it. I was brought up to believe you can do anything.”
His persistence has paid off. The Master Pools Guild, the National Spa & Pool Institute and the Northeast Spa & Pool Association have all honored Aveta with design awards, in categories including technical achievement. He’s also become the go-to guy for the architect.
“He was so impressed with us, he comes to us all the time,” Aveta says. “I can use [this technique] all the time for more of these indoor/outdoor pools. We’re looking at two more now.”
