Swimming Pool Rehab
Put your decorative concrete skills to work — reinvent the entire swimming pool environment, using color, texture and elevation.
by David Thompson
to rehabilitate a worn-out pool deck, he’s not satisfied with merely jazzing up the old slab. He likes to reinvent the entire swimming pool environment, using color, texture and elevation.
“We’re known for our imagination, and a lot of times our imagination involves removal and replacement of portions of the deck to change the overall appearance of the pool,” says McMahon, president of Architectural Concrete Design in Levittown, Pa., which does some 500 pool jobs a year. One of McMahon’s current commercial jobs involves putting a “beach entry” into a pool, in which a gradually sloping deck will descend into the water. The deck will resemble rippled, wind-blown sand. “We’re pouring new concrete and imprinting it with sort of a rippled texture, and then we’ll sandblast it and put a sand-rich mix of concrete over it,” McMahon says.
Whether the job calls for a sweeping overhaul a la Chris McMahon or simply a tinted overlay that adds some splash to a dull deck, decorative concrete has become a standard feature in swimming pool makeovers.
In recent years, the two perennial favorites in concrete decking, spraydeck and kooldeck, have been joined at poolside by the new generation of stamped overlay systems. Stamped systems offer a vast array of looks, from tile to stone to brick. Spraydeck and kooldeck, on the other hand, offer skid resistance and cool-on-the-feet surfaces that are hard to beat. Sometimes the old and the new coexist side-by-side, with spraydeck or kooldeck put closest to the water while stamped flatwork holds down the outfield.
|
