Tile update

Here are some more pics of the tile progress. All that's left is the top of the spa and the spa waterline.

Finally some tile

Today was my first day back to work, but I still had a couple of hours after work to lay some tile. I had planned to do a lot more tile work yesterday while I was still off work, but the previous 4 days of working on the pool caught up with me and I ended up resting most of the day. I did set a small section of tile yesterday, just to test how well everything sets up, and to get used to working with thinset with acrylic admix, since I have never used that formulation before.

Tonight I finished about 3/4 of the main pool waterline tile and the skimmer. Hopefully over the next couple of nights I'll get most of the tile finished. Here are a few pictures of how it's going so far.

More Power!

At last I found the solution to speed up removing the thinset - a pneumatic chisel! The only problem was, my air compressor had a hard time powering it for very long. I ended up taking 3 days off work so I could make some progress on the pool, so I decided to go ahead and spend the money and rent a better air compressor. Now it turns out my compressor wasn't that bad, just slower, so when my friend Todd offered to help out over the weekend, I picked up another chisel and an air hose and we both went to work. It's a good thing too, because between the two of us it took the better part of 3 days to finish removing all of the thinset and clean up.

The first day was plagued with several technical difficulties. Besides the requisite dozen trips to the hardware store, we quickly found that the $10 Harbor Freight air chisels (the only ones they had in stock) were good for about 30-60 minutes of work before blowing out. After going through 4 of them in 1 day, I ended up returning them and bought some decent Ingersol Rand chisels from Northern Tool - at $50 a pop! Still, it was worth it considering we would still be chiseling away if we didn't have them.

On Sunday afternoon, we finished the last bit of chiseling - a full hour before the rented compressor had to be returned! Then we spent the rest of the afternoon sweeping and vacuuming up all the debris, and finally hosed down everything to get rid of the dust. After 2 long weeks, all the prep work for the tile job was done, and we were finally ready to lay tile.

Careful with that (chisel) Eugene

So it's the first weekend in March, and the project is officially underway. As I began draining the pool, my highly skilled apprentice startedremoving the old tile from around the spa. I thought this would be one of the most labor intensive parts of the project, but I was wrong. The old tile came off fairly easy, but there was a ton of thinset left behind. Since Ryan had the chiseling mastered, I began to look for ways to more easily remove the old thinset. I experimented with acid, angle grinders, and even manual chiseling (which worked, but would take me until retirement to complete).

So over the course of the first 2 weekends in March, Ryan removed tile and I cleaned up and tried to remove thinset. By the end of the second weekend (my birthday), we had achieved our goal of removing all of the tile and everything was cleaned up. And I was on the verge of finding the solution to our thinset problem.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

Well, mostly the ugly. As it neared 13 years old, our pool was in pretty desperate shape. We've had our share of the usual mechanical problems - bad check valves, cracked filter, even replaced the main pump last fall with a nice new 2-speed model. But cosmetically, the pool was ready for a complete makeover.

Large sections of tile around the raised spa had come loose and fallen off. At first I tried to patch these areas (as did the previous owner gauging by the copious amounts of putty in some areas), but eventually I gave up the battle and decided at some point we would just replace the old tile completely. Besides, neither of us really liked the old tile pattern anyway, so no big loss.

The plaster finish was in similar condition, and was worsening each season. What began as several splotchy areas which appeared shortly after we bought the house (damn that inspector!) eventually turned into all out failures, with several areas worn all the way through to the gunite. Besides being an eyesore, these problems also made it very uncomfortable for the kids to use the pool because the rough plaster really tears up your feet.

Over a year ago, I started looking into solutions to the problem. The tile work was something I decided to tackle myself pretty much from the beginning. I've tiled a couple of floors in our home and am fairly competant with a trowel, so that seemed like an excellent opportunity to save some money. So, I just had to find someone to replaster the pool, or so I thought. If you haven't ever tried to get a recommendation for someone to refinish a pool, it is definitely an eye-opening experience. Everyone I asked gave me an answer along the lines of "well we used so-and-so, but I wouldn't recommend him". I found that it was nearly impossible to find someone who is happy with their pool refinishing job. So before I hired someone to do it, I wanted to know why it was so darned hard so I knew what to look for and what questions to ask.

The more I read about the subject, the more I began to dislike plaster as a pool finish. Sure, that original plaster job might last you 15 years, but after that you are lucky to get 5-7 years out of plaster. The profit margins appear to be pretty high on these jobs, so it's no wonder they keep being pushed as the "standard" resurfacing technique. Looking for alternatives to plaster led me in the usual directions Google will send you - fiberglass refinishing products and 2-part epoxies. After reading all the pros and cons of each, I decided to go with an industrial epoxy called Ultraguard. We'll see if it lives up to its hype as the project proceeds.