Swimming Pool Update

Time for a pool update.  I'm going to blow through this aquatic adventure in just 2 posts.  There will be a lot of pictures so I hope your data plans are paid up.  This means the tale will unfold seamlessly as if you are watching one of those time lapse videos of a sunflower opening, when in reality the process took a 1,000 times longer,  Our "concrete flower" blossomed slowly, too. But in the end it turned out to be one of the best things we did for the house, so let's get started.

We last left the pool at the Gunite stage and you can read about that HERE.  After a couple of weeks of hosing it down we were ready for tile and coping.

We had to go to a local stone supply yard to select the stone we wanted for the coping.  Limestone is popular down here, but we were looking for a smooth finish and opted for lewder stone in a neutral tone.  The harder decision was the tile.  Like any major construction project, the pool came with a "standard" selection of tile included with the base price.  And like most standard options they leave you uninspired.  So we spent a good deal of time reviewing samples.  In hindsight, Roberta spent the good deal of time, I just had to provide votes and opinions which were acknowledged, but not necessarily valued ;)

We definitely wanted to use glass tiles in a 1”x 2” format and there were a lot of choices.  And since our pool is a simple design we didn't need a lot of it.  Berta set some samples up around the pool to see how they looked in the sun.

We chose a glass tile with a slight metallic patina named Arctic Ocean.   We have a family of swimmers and some of us might even get a little training done in this pool.  And for this reason we decided to have a swim lane with a tile stripe for flip turn spotting.  We used 1" x 2" tiles for all the surface tile work, and 1" x 1" for the bottom tile work.

The tile was ordered, and in the meantime our stone mason got to work with the lewder stone.  His name was Marcus and he was excellent.  We asked him to widen the south end of the pool so there was a platform people could safely walk onto to dive or jump into the water.  He built a CMU wall that would be skim coated in concrete and then capped with lewder stone.  Here is that effort captured in a photo!

The coping turned out great, but like many things in this project, it was 2 steps forward and one step back.  Once the coping was complete it was clear that the elevation of the pool was about an 1" higher than the slab.  The design was suppose to have the pool flush with the rear porch, but it was sitting proud.

Here you can see the difference in elevation from the porch (right) and the pool coping (left).

View from the porch and you can see the pool coping installed around the pool.

We had a drain installed between the coping and the porch.  This will direct water run-off to the ends of the pool.  Should keep rain run-off out of the pool, and and over filled pool from flooding into the house.

It is hard to see, but the surface to surface difference is significantly worse towards the ends of the pool than the center.

It wasn't a clear answer who was at fault.  Without question the pool was too high, but the rear slab had some issues, too.  The slab was only 1/2" lower than the pool in the center and nearly 1.5" off at each end.  So no matter where the pool builder put the coping it was not going to be flush end to end.  At this point I was happy to put "Pool Company" in touch with "Home Builder" and have them fight it out.  In the end the Home Builder stepped up and made it good.  In fact, they made it excellent, but I'll get back to that later.

Marcus marched on with the tile install, and we loved the look.  Here are some photos we snapped during the install.

The tile in the one of the skimmers (the bug sucker uppers)

You can see the 3 foot wide coping on the south end of the pool.  It aligns with the step on the foundation.  Marcus skim coated the CMU wall and it looks like original gunite surface.

Arctic Ocean tile...

The bottom stripe in 1" square tiles.

Marcus putting the finishing touches on the swimming lane.

Berta checking out the work from inside the pool.  You can see the pathetic remains of the Pedernales River in the background.  Will the drought ever end?

Thanks for stopping by.  Part 2 coming soon!