Happy Days
With a new home gym, a family now has room and time to train
PREV
|
 BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER / THE SEATTLE TIMES "We have such a great house we don't want to go someplace else for a gym," says mom Christine Day, on the treadmill in the family's new fitness room above their garage. Daughter Kaleigh practices yoga while brother Connor checks out his options. |
A home gym is not the kind of thing you want to assemble on the cheap, says Kirk Jensen, assistant manager at Fitness Shop in Bellevue and a veteran personal trainer.
Equipment has to support not just your body weight but the weight of whatever you're lifting. Consider wear and tear, he says. "You can spend $900 and it'll last a year or spend $2,000 and it'll last much longer," he says. "You don't save money, because you're going to go out and buy again and again."
Jensen says a good question to ask when shopping is, "Who's gonna be there when it breaks down?" Seek out companies that offer warranties for parts, repairs and replacements.
Home gym sets such as the Vectra the Days own, which is handmade by a Kent company, run from $1,800 to $9,000 and come with a lifetime warranty. The best treadmills come with orthopedic or two-ply belts to make walking less strenuous; they range from $2,100 to $6,000. A Tuff Stuff weight bench costs $400 to $500.
Jensen says 90 percent of people who create home gyms put in a TV or sound system. Visuals and music can help boost motivation and make time go faster.
It all started with a leak over Pat and Christine Day's three-car garage last year.
That's when a contractor told the Days, whose two-story house is perched on the shores of Lake Sammamish in Bellevue, that a room could be added over the garage during the repairs.
Lightbulbs went on.
The Days started thinking about what they could do with the extra space.
"Next thing we knew," says Christine, "we had an exercise room."
The Days and their three children, two of whom still live at home, are all big on working out. But their location often made reaching any of the gyms on the Eastside something of a traffic and time hassle.
The family already had a few pieces of exercise equipment, like a huge Vectra workout station that took up whole sections of Christine and Pat's "very crowded master bedroom." Not an ideal arrangement, given that Pat, who owns the boat dealership ProTour Watersports in Kirkland, worked out in the early mornings and that the children had to pad through Mom and Dad's space just to reach the equipment.
A home gym is not the kind of thing you want to assemble on the cheap, says Kirk Jensen, assistant manager at Fitness Shop in Bellevue and a veteran personal trainer.
Equipment has to support not just your body weight but the weight of whatever you're lifting. Consider wear and tear, he says. "You can spend $900 and it'll last a year or spend $2,000 and it'll last much longer," he says. "You don't save money, because you're going to go out and buy again and again."
Jensen says a good question to ask when shopping is, "Who's gonna be there when it breaks down?" Seek out companies that offer warranties for parts, repairs and replacements.
Home gym sets such as the Vectra the Days own, which is handmade by a Kent company, run from $1,800 to $9,000 and come with a lifetime warranty. The best treadmills come with orthopedic or two-ply belts to make walking less strenuous; they range from $2,100 to $6,000. A Tuff Stuff weight bench costs $400 to $500.
Jensen says 90 percent of people who create home gyms put in a TV or sound system. Visuals and music can help boost motivation and make time go faster.
It made sense to create a space that functioned purely as a fitness center, was accessible to everyone in the family and, most of all, didn't require a commute. In one airy room, the Days have arranged the Vectra station, an elliptical machine, a stationary bike, a treadmill, weight bench and even a decadent-looking massage chair.
With a gym so conveniently integrated into their home — at a cost of about $60,000 for construction — the Days have even more incentive to incorporate fitness training into their daily lives.
"Now I can get up and do my 30 minutes on the treadmill and shower in the same time it takes just to drive to the gym and find a place to park," says Christine, who retired in February as a Starbucks executive.
A door with tinted glass leads from the gym into the vestibule that fronts the bedroom, giving the parents easy access to the fitness equipment but also affording them some privacy.
The family put in a wall-mounted flat-screen TV that pivots so they can watch from anywhere in the room. There's a DVD player, an iPod station, a mini-fridge and a shelf with cubby holes for storage. An open space on the hardwood floor leaves room for Christine and her daughter Kaleigh, 18, to do Pilates and yoga in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror.
The space also works well as an alternate family room. Friends of Kaleigh and her 8-year-old brother, Connor, love it. After school, they come on over. The room even has a nickname — "Gym Day."
To decide on what should go in the gym, Pat studied equipment comparisons online and in publications such as Consumer Reports. As a frequent business traveler who often used hotel fitness centers, Christine had a good sense of what she wanted. The Days wound up purchasing the treadmill, bike, weight bench, dumbbell set and yoga mats at Fitness Shop in Bellevue.
Like a commercial gym, Gym Day has options that fit everybody's needs. Kaleigh likes the Life Fitness 5500 HR elliptical machine and new Vision Fitness E3200 bike most. Christine likes the new True treadmill. Pat uses the stationary bike to condition for trail-riding, and Connor's favorite is the dumbbells.
Kaleigh says there's a world of difference between a commercial gym and one at home. The Redmond High School senior used to work out at a gym near school, but she had to wake up at 4:15 just to get it all in before school.
While fitness is very much a lifestyle for the Days, Pat understands the gym is still on trial: "The true measure is whether they're still using it a year from now."
Tyrone Beason is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. Benjamin Benschneider is a magazine staff photographer.
|
|
|
|
Back to top