Feeling the Squeeze: How Installers are fitting Fiberglass Pools through tighter spaces with bigger
homes on smaller lots, dealers must get creative and that’s exactly what Artistic Pools did here.
By: Nate Taylor
You’re not imagining things: The Great American Backyard is shrinking.
In their zeal to maximize available land, developers are packing homes into parcels so tight that
it’s chocking out traditional access points for fiberglass pools, such as the side yard. And some
homes are so tall and close to each other that crane operators are turning the jobs down.
This trend is causing real logistical problems for dealers. And yet homeowners are demanding
fiberglass pools like never before.
What are installers to do?
Get creative.

The handoff by Artistic Pools Corp
Installers transfer the pool from one excavator to the other, affixing it onto the smaller machine.
Installers transfer the pool from one excavator to the other, affixing it onto the smaller machine.
The neighbor called it impossible. Mark Peditto was happy to prove him wrong.
Peditto and Michael Neri, president and vice president, respectively, of Artistic Pools, orchestrated one of the
trickiest installations of their career when they squeezed a 15-foot-wide, 34-foot-long pool through a space about as
wide as the pool was deep.
Because the houses were too tall and the yard too far back, craning the pool over was out of the question. So the
Cinnaminson, N.J. builder planned to use an excavator to carry the pool through the side yard. The problem? The
chimney. The excavator couldn’t fit between it and the house next door.
This would be a job for two excavators — one large and one small.
The large one, holding the pool on its side by a series of straps around the bucket, transported it to the midway
point of the side yard, where it met its smaller counterpart, bucket to bucket. From there, the team rigged the
dangling pool to the bucket of the small excavator in a midair exchange.
“We made sure that, before disengaging from the excavator, that it was securely in place on the lifting hook of the
second one,” Peditto explains.
So the pool wouldn’t swing pendulously between two $800,000 homes, crew members dropped its back end onto a
series of dollies. This allowed the smaller excavator to pull the pool straight on through to the other side, past the
chimney.
“We’ve done pools in tight yards, but that was a pretty innovative way of getting it back there,” Peditto says.
And a funny thing about the neighbor who claimed it couldn’t be done: He was a pool builder.