Hot Tub Lessons Learned By Stephanie Ornelas
Winter is here and that means one thing: it’s hot tub season. No matter where your next project is, whether it’s in Southern California or North Chicago, it’s a known fact that most homeowners appreciate a hot soak. But not all decks and their hot tubs are built the same. Three outdoor living pros share a few lessons they’ve learned when installing hot tubs in their projects. Leave some room.
One thing the carpentry team at Webfoot, Bend, OR., specializes in is building decks around sunken hot tubs, says owner Gavin Hepp. “We recently finished a deck with a sunken hot tub in it and if you look at it, you’ll see we’ve got the radius on the hot tub, and we also have our
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Winter 2021
deck boards perfectly scribed all the way around with a nice gap on them,” Hepp explained. “The reason for the gap is that way when your hot tub needs work or if it ever needs to be replaced, there’s plenty of room for it to be craned out.” To carry out this necessary feature, Hepp and his team installed hatches for easy access to the hot tub panel. “Just lift her right up and start working on your hot tub. And it’s the same for all sides. In this certain situation, and most decks that we deal with that have hot tubs, the concrete slab and foundation for the hot tub is already there.” Hepp continued, “Any time you have short pieces of decking, oftentimes they’ll look a little jagged or they won’t line up. But if you look at our decks, you’ll notice that we have perfectly
