They bought the Dresher farmhouse on impulse, falling hard for it's thick stone walls and densely landscaped grounds. That it had an indoor swimming pool in an old barn just added to the charm.
"We thought we'd use it regularly. We thought we'd actually begin to exercise. Both . . . assumptions turned out to be false," software developer Tom McCahill says cheerfully.
While their son, Tom, was young, it made sense to keep the pool. Once, he'd left for college, they figured out a better use for the pavilion.
"We're probably the strangest baby boomers around'" Jane McCahill says. "Just at the time when we should have been thinking about exercising and keeping fit, what do we do? We put in a bar and home theater."
Tom laughs. "We figured we could either make this really a good fitness center or we could put in a bar and have movies on demand." For these sociable cineastes, it was a no-brainer.
Besides, the pool was in poor repair. "It had never been ventilated properly, so the whole structure was just poached and pickled," explains Kiki Bolender of Schade and Bolender Architects.
The footprint of the pavilion remained essentially unaltered, though that was about all that stayed the same. "The walls weren't in great shape, so we took them down. Then we found out that some of the foundation wasn't in great shape either," she says.
Bolender's big idea for the interior was to support the cypress rafters with massive Douglas fir trusses. Traditional in design, with mortise-and-tenon joints, the timber
