No grout about it...

Well, it's been a busy week since I last posted. First of all, we finished the grout! My dad and I worked on it last Sunday and finished about 3/4 of it. Then he came over Monday evening and we would have finished it but - I ran out of grout mix with only about 12-15' of waterline tile left! The instructions called for 24 lbs. of mix for 100 sq. ft. of 1x1 tile. I bought 50 lbs. of mix for ~85 sq. ft. of tile and ran short. Besides me being really sloppy and wasting a lot (note - grouting a vertical wall is a LOT messier than a floor), I think the biggest difference was in the 3/8" gap along the top of the tile, which was completely filled in with grout.

Anyway, a quick trip to Master Tile at lunch Tuesday to get another bag of grout, and the last bit of grouting was finished Tuesday afternoon. In the rain. Just a drizzle at first - then it really rained steady. I took the afternoon off to finish the grout before the rain came in, which according to the weatherman wasn't supposed to happen until that evening. As soon as I finished mixing the grout - you guessed it. I was determined to get it done (I originally had only planned on 1 day for grout), so I just stood there in the rain and finished it. For the most part it worked ok, but there was one place where water was leaking from under the deck into the pool, and every time I tried to cover up that hole with grout, it just washed it away. The rest turned out fine - here's a quick picture:



So with the tile finished and the end in site, I took the rest of the week off to work on this project. Who needs vacation days anyway? The original thinking was that I could do the prep for the Ultraguard on Weds. and Thurs. and then apply the coating Fri. and Sat. I quickly found out that wouldn't happen, because it takes 2-3 days after prep for the concrete to dry out enough to apply the Ultraguard. No problem, I would just get all the prep done and then apply the coating when I had a 4-5 day window of clear weather. The prep for the Ultraguard breaks down to these steps:

1 - Pressure wash the pool to remove any dirt and loose plaster.

2- Wash the pool with trisodium phosphate (TSP) to remove any grease and oils which can inhibit the acid wash to follow

3- Acid wash the pool to etch the plaster

4- Immediately wash again with TSP to neutralize the acid

5- Chip out any loose plaster and make repairs

6- Wait until concrete is dry (2-3 days, you do a moisture test in several areas to check)

7 - Apply Ultraguard (bond coat, wait a day, then top coat)

8 - Wait a day, fill pool

I've been studying these instructions for 3 months, and it doesn't really sound too bad. I feel like I was very prepared for all of these steps, so after 3 days work I am proud to say that I'm finished... with step 1. :(

That's right, it took me a good 2 1/2 days to finish all the pressure washing. This is primarily because my pool finish was in much worse shape than I thought. Almost immediately after I started pressure washing, I noticed large sections of the plaster just flying off exposing the raw gunite below. After doing a small section, I called Ken at Ultraguard to make sure I wasn't overdoing it. He assured me, all that loose plaster has to be removed. So I kept at it.

In retrospect, I might have been a little more thorough than necessary at this stage. Some areas of the plaster came off easily - the water sliced through it like the proverbial knife through butter. Other areas were more stubborn - they would flake and peel, but not come off all the way down to the gunite. But if I kept working them over with the water pressure, they would slowly erode away until they were mostly worn all the way down. I don't doubt that these areas needed to be removed, but I wonder if it could have been done more efficiently between the acid and manual chiseling. Oh well, hopefully the extra time spent here will save me a little time when I'm chipping out the weak plaster later.

I mentioned calling Ken earlier - I just wanted to take the time to say that he has been extremely helpful during all this. I know some people are following this blog specifically for information about Ultraguard, and some have said that they don't give the best customer service. And I've noticed that sometimes it takes awhile to get an email response, or they were somewhat short on the phone. I think a lot of that is because this is a small operation and they seem to be growing quickly (although that doesn't neccessarily excuse it). But I can say this - when it comes to assistance during the application of the product, none of that applies at all. I have called Ken 3 times in the last 4 days with questions, and only once did he not take my call immediately, and the other time he called me back with 2 minutes. Every time, he was extremely helpful and reassuring. That's just my 2 cents - I have no interest in the company other than if the product is as good as it sounds, I want the company to be around 12 years from now when it's time to apply a new top coat.

So, that's where I'm at now. Tomorrow morning I start all the washes, then the chip out. I have all weekend to work on this, and the weather should be nice, so hopefully I can make some good progress. I doubt I can finish all the patch work, because as you can see from the pictures there are a LOT of areas to patch. But hopefully I can finish the chip out, and maybe get some patching done. I'll try to keep updating each night as this moves along.

Update

Just thought I would give a little update of what's happened over the last week. Monday I started cleaning out all the thinset from the gaps between the tile. This was a big job, especially around the quarter round where I had to use a lot of thinset to get it to stick. During the process, I noticed a few lose tiles, so I started marking them with tape to go back and repair later.

I didn't get a chance to work on the pool again until tonight, when I finished removing the thinset from the gaps and re-set the loose tiles I had previously marked. So now the tile should be 100% ready for grouting. There is a front moving in and we are getting some rain, but it is supposed to clear out sometime Saturday morning. So the current plan is to grout on Saturday afternoon.

Sunday we should be able to start prepping for the Ultraguard application. This will require a total of 3 washes (TSP, acid, then TSP again), plus repairing all the damaged plaster by filling it in with thinset. Optimistically, I might be able to complete that on Sunday, but realistically I might need a session or two during the week to finish all the prep.

The Ultraguard application shouldn't take more than a couple of hours per coat, so this could easily be done in the evenings after work. So right now, I'm looking at being ready for the Ultraguard application by later next week, or next weekend at the worst. It's all coming together pretty quick now, and it's exciting to think that this project could be done and the pool filled again within the next week!

Tiling is done!

Well, setting the tile that is. I still need to grout, but this is a major milestone. The last couple of weeks have been hectic and I haven't had much time to work on the tile. Plus, we were having trouble figuring out how to finish the top of the spa, specifically how to handle the transition between the tile on the spa wall and the top of the spa. A simple butt joint wouldn't work, because the tile is just short of the top of the wall, so there would have been a > 1/4" grout line around the top, which wouldn't look right. We first picked out a blue quarter round that matched some of the blue in the tile perfectly, but when we laid it out it just didn't work.

After trying a couple more colors of quarter round, I then had the idea to do the top of the spa in 3x3 blue tile that matched the blue quarter round. I bought a few sheets of tile and laid it out, and again it just didn't look right. Then I thought about buying some coping tile with a bullnose edge and using that on top of the spa. Although we liked the looks of it, it would have required a lot of cutting, i.e. a lot of work. Also, it just didn't work well with the flagstone coping that already covers 2/3 of the top of the spa. We agreed that if we were going to do the the coping, we should tear out the existing flagstone around the spa and do the entire top of the spa in the same coping. That was way too much work and way out of the budget, so we nixed that idea.

Finally, it came to me - the reason the quarter round looked out of place was because you had a solid blue line around the edge of the spa, which stood out from the varied mosaic pattern. I picked up some black quarter round, and alternated it with the blue and that did the trick. Just by adding the second color, the quarter round blends in with the rest of the tile so much better.

So having solved that problem, I took today off work with the goal of getting all the tile set. I started by setting all of the quarter round, which was a very messy process. That's why there is so much thinset showing in the gaps around the quarter round. I had to slap a bunch of thinset on the back, then stick the tile to the corner. Then I put some thinset on the top of the spa and pushed it up against the back of the quarter round - backfilling the tile with thinset, so to speak. Then I put a skim coat of thinset on the entire top of the spa to raise the level a little bit, since the quarter round stuck up a little higher than the tile. Finally, after a last minute trip to the tile store (I was 2 sheets of tile short!) I laid all the tile on the top of the spa and the job was done.

Next up will be grouting on Monday, weather permitting. Hope everyone has a great Easter weekend.