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There's a swimming pool under my house


laurenco

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So here's something we found in the ground when levelling our site ... an old swimming pool. I said "under the house" in the title, but it's only under the ground surface level by inches and therefore a basement leisure area is not an option. As it falls half under and half outside our new house's footprint we have a problem. What do we do with it?

 

  • Remove it all and pay for the concrete to be taken away say. 4 loaders + 1 or 2 days labour

 

  • Put a metal deck on top and moth ball it. c. £2k materials + 2 days labour. Expensive and doesn't achieve a great deal

 

  • Fill it in with hardcore and pretend it's not there. Cheap; we have loads of hardcore. Raft foundations will go on top. But will this be safe?

 

  • We could create a 3m x 2m x 1.25m high wine cellar beneath the kitchen, but I'm trying to guestimate costs and I think it will be thousands of pounds. The glass hatch alone is £2k and that's assuming MBC can work their foundations around this. 

 

Has anyone experienced anything like this before? and / or, can anyone offer any other solutions? (nice answers only please ?)

 

Swimming_Pool.JPG

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10 minutes ago, laurenco said:

We could create a 3m x 2m x 1.25m high wine cellar beneath the kitchen, but I'm trying to guestimate costs and I think it will be thousands of pounds. The glass hatch alone is £2k and that's assuming MBC can work their foundations around this. 

 

Done this with the old garage pit and it basically cost a sheet of OSB and some reinforcing. Think the total size is 2600x900x1400 and I expect the door will cost about £60 and the steps will be from scrap 8x2....

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1 hour ago, Nickfromwales said:

I doubt I could ever build a house without a basement tbh, as it’s such a waste of useful space. Even more so if this was my forever home. 

 

How so if you have lots of space above ground? I see the benefit if you are tight on space or can only go single storey but otherwise if you can get the size you need anyway I don’t see the point of one TBH. 

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2 hours ago, PeterW said:

 

Done this with the old garage pit and it basically cost a sheet of OSB and some reinforcing. Think the total size is 2600x900x1400 and I expect the door will cost about £60 and the steps will be from scrap 8x2....

 

What about tanking, insulating etc?

 

 

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43 minutes ago, newhome said:

 

How so if you have lots of space above ground? I see the benefit if you are tight on space or can only go single storey but otherwise if you can get the size you need anyway I don’t see the point of one TBH. 

It’s quite obscene the amount of wasted space a residential dwelling can create. A basement adds, up to, an entire floor so why would you not? You’ve paid top dollar for your plot, you need foundations, so just make them very long, deep foundations and bingo. 

Get a trap door for the 4 kids and “sorted!”.

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Nothing .... 

 

there is 100mm of PIR over the top but nothing more 

 

Ground is sand around here - very dusty in the bottom of the pit and no real sign of damp. Temperature has stayed a static 9-10c which is ideal for wine ..!

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2 hours ago, Nickfromwales said:

 

Get a trap door for the 4 kids and “sorted!”.

 

Ok, so good for imprisoning children, or to use as a dungeon or torture chamber then. You’re not selling it TBH. My take is that I deffo wouldn’t want a larger house and would much rather have something with natural light. Horses for courses I guess ?

 

 

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@declan52 unfortunately we don't have the height. With a roof on it, it'd be 1.25m high at best inside.

 

Moving the house forwards on the plot to miss it would take the house too close to the road. 

 

Moving the house backwards 3 metres to cover it completely might work, but without the head height it's largely useless.

 

I think we need to abandon it completely and fill it in.

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Would be a lovely feature in a living room,  definitely eye catching!!!

Just seems such a waste to fill it in.  Some sort of wine cellar, pantry would be  handy.  On your current plans as they are where would the  access point be.

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If you want to use it as a basement you shouldn't need to tank it as it is a swimming pool so should be water proof. You could insulate the interior, it wouldn't need much as it is underground, but putting some kind of roof on the part outside the foundations would not be easy. It would probably have to be at least 200mm thick so would either reduce head height or stick out above ground level. Plus it would need to support whatever landscaping you wanted to have.

 

Are your foundations not dug down a few hundred mils into the ground? If so they will go right through the middle of it reducing head height to well below 1m. You will also have to knock out the sides where the foundations sit.

 

I would think just filling it in with hardcore to give a good base for the foundation is the best solution. Even if the foundations could sit on top  I would still probably do this.

 

A SE would probably want to look at it. A pool should have plenty of load bearing capacity, but I would think they want it confirmed.

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19 hours ago, Nickfromwales said:

It’s quite obscene the amount of wasted space a residential dwelling can create. A basement adds, up to, an entire floor so why would you not? You’ve paid top dollar for your plot, you need foundations, so just make them very long, deep foundations and bingo. 

Get a trap door for the 4 kids and “sorted!”.

A basement is right for some, but here, with our very high water table, the cost of adding a basement in £/square metre would be more than just building a bigger house, and we have enough land that if we had wanted a bigger house we could do so.

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  • 3 weeks later...

my first guess would be it was filled because it leaked,so assuming it would be tanked is dangerous 

Me I would knock out the walls of it and hardcore it as any other foundation and carry on 

mybe you can get concrete crusher on site cheaper and you use it as hard core?

or just disc cut the walls and use them as hard core in bit bits on the pool floor 

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I suspect you're right @scottishjohn about it leaking and then being filled in.

 

I've had a quote to disc cut the top of the walls and lay them on the pool floor which sounds like the cheapest way forward.

 

I'm waiting to hear back from MBC on whether we can sink a sewer pipe in the 'deep end' and access it through the floor of the house without ruining our insulated foundations.

Screenshot 2018-11-12 at 13.21.58.png

Screenshot 2018-11-12 at 13.24.44.png

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7 minutes ago, scottishjohn said:

you really want a sewer manhole in house ?

what if sealing is not good? --and sealed ones will be expensive -surely better a bit more plumbing +bends if required and have it outside   that would be my first choice?

 

The idea, I think, is to tank it and use it as a wine cellar, as in the photo.  I can't see any obvious reason why setting some rings in the deep end of the old pool, tanking the outside of them, with a basement membrane underneath and running up the outside to above DPM level, shouldn't work just fine.  There will be a bit of heat loss via the hatch, but that could be mitigated with a better insulated access hatch design.

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If you fill it in, it will save you a fortune in skips ? we had to dispose of 150 tons of clay.£££££££. Our current problem in our new build is   Storing veg somewhere cool (we drink the wine too fast to store it!).

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On 23/10/2018 at 12:15, laurenco said:

Has anyone experienced anything like this before? and / or, can anyone offer any other solutions? (nice answers only please ?)

 

Have you worked out the Muckaway savings if you fill it in?

 

At (guestimating - not my thing but @recoveringacademic will have it in SPONS) say £5-10 per cube to have it taken away filling that pool in with your scrapings could save ~£1500 (at say a conservative 1-1.5m by 6m x 12m  = 70 cube to 100 cube), which at the least would pay partly towards your bridge over the top if you need one.

 

Ferdinand

 

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