Dog Hydrotherapy Pool

There are always those jobs where you don’t know how you ended up doing them, but you do, and I love to be challenged. I had previously done work on one of my client’s garden. This particular client ran a dog walking business and was having a change of direction, wanting to open a Hydrotherapy centre for dogs in Bow in an old railway arch.

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Neither of us had done a project like it before. The client started research on the pool, and I did the rest. They gave me a brief then got the keys a month early for the property and tasked me with building the hydrotherapy pool thing in 5 days, from start to finish, since they would begin paying rent and needed to open. After calling around my usual team with some extra additions, I said yes. The pool was to be installed by a company then I had to do the rest to accelerate the project to meet the deadline. 

The challenges we faced as a team were vast. We needed to bring up the floor to meet the pool which simultaneously had to be sloped. We were required to build a storage space, office space, and connect all the excess water plumbing. All the lighting had to be changed, and everything had to comply with pool regulations, re-electrics, and non-slip flooring.

I went into art director /set design mode. I ordered every piece of wood, screw and miscellaneous tools to be delivered on-site before the build. The lighting went in before we started the build as you can’t put a ladder in a pool or work in the dark. We worked like crazy building the decking, the plumber doing his job at the same time. Every day I had a timeline of what had to be done before allowing the team to go home, and they had all agreed to do this before we started. It was all hands on deck, literally.

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The client couldn’t believe we actually completed it in time and it was the most fun I’d had on a project in ages. The best part was overhearing one of the customers in the local park where I walk my dog raving about how fabulous the place was, and what a difference the hydrotherapy pool was making to her dog's mobility.