Welcome to the final installment of our Stone in Your Home Series. We’ve gone through your house and discussed just what responsibilities you can expect for yourself in maintaining natural stone in that room.
Today, we’re remaining outside and focusing on something equally challenging:
Your Pool Deck
Whether you are considering installing a pool or buying a house with one already built in, you can expect to put in a ton of care into just maintaining the pool.
If you intend to go beyond the utility of the pool and elevate the design with natural stone pavers and coping, you’ll need to be prepared for added responsibility.
As with your patio, your pool coping and pavers can expect to face many types of wear and tear such as:
- Wear from constant traffic
- Exposure to dirt
- Decaying leaves
- Heat
- Cold
- Constant Moisture.
It will also face scuffs and scratches from pool furniture, and also need to cope with chemicals such as chlorine and bromine, which you use to keep the pool’s water clean.
Pool Maintenance
By this point in our series, you are a pro, and you know that they key to maintaining a gorgeous, natural-stone oriented pool is diligent care.
This principle becomes especially important around a pool.
The constant moisture from splashing and people moving in and out of the pool will turn dirt to mud and cause leaves to decompose and rot much faster on the stones surface in a more damaging way.
Make sure your stone pavers and coping are sealed with a high-quality sealer, formulated for use on natural stone.
We at SBSM love Dry-Treat’s Stain Proof for these kinds of jobs. It does an excellent job at penetrating porous stone like pool coping with a water AND oil repellent seal that retains the natural surface color and finish, and is long lasting in its efficacy.
You’ll want it to be salt-resistant, and breathable to help keep stone from cracking when expanding and contracting in extreme weather conditions.
If you’re having a pool party, make sure to sweep the pavers around the pool before and after. Weekly attention to the stone surfaces around your pool will ensure that dirt and decomposing leaves don’t tarnish the stone.
At the start of your pool season, check out the grout between pavers and coping.
If cracks are beginning to form, use some waterproof caulking colored to match the mortar to fill it in.
Don’t skimp on this!
You face a much more intensive chore if the mortar begins to crumble.
Your pool area is a place that is going to see a lot of use all at once in the summer, and then see very little of it in colder weather.
As such, it is easy to forget to be constant in your care for it.
Don’t let it fall by the wayside! Your future self will thank your now self for the little bit of work you put in, which will save you time and money down the road.
Want to Learn More about Natural Stone?
We here at SBSM love helping other people make the best decisions they can for their homes. Please keep checking in with us for more great tips to help you better understand natural stone!
Do you have more questions on natural stone? Feel free to reach out to us on any curiosity you may have!
