Advice - Concrete Pool Deck Coping

ejleonard

I'm replacing a vinyl liner on a pool with concrete bullnose coping. The home owner is having the deck & coping demo'd / repoured by a fairly inexperienced contractor who's running in to problems and asked my input. I'm not sure how to address and thought I'd solicit here to folks smarter than me.

- The existing concrete was poured 5+ inches down to the tops of the pool wall "X-braces" (pool-wall tiebacks in the ground) Breaking up the concrete damages the x-brackets due to the way and depth it was poured. Has anyone encountered this and can suggest a demo method to minimize damage to the x-brackets?

- There is water seepage under major parts of the concrete deck that left 4-5 inch voids all the way around (under the concrete). Is it best to fill those voids with concrete when repouring or is it better to first compact with infill first (QP or similar)?

- Another option I suggested to avoid the bracket damage is to just resurface the existing concrete after address the water seepage issues first in either case. The concrete is strucurally in decent shape, it just settled some and looks old/dull/gray. Would a cool deck or similar product bond well to aged concrete? It has little to no surface cracks.

Thanks for reading.

CJKarl

I'd use flowable fill in the voids, less outward pressure.

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CJKarl

As far as the demo goes, sounds like it's time to get the saw out.

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6stringmason

I agree with CJ.

If the concrete is sound and you are afraid of doing further damage to the braces you could have the concrete resurfaced. There are companies that can come in and polish it, or even clean and acid stain it. It will look better than when it was new.

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ejleonard

Thanks for the replies. We got the rest of the concrete out with minimal damage to the pool x-braces today.

Looking under concrete, especially surrounding pools is like pulling off sheetrock on old homes - its better not knowing what's under there sometimes.

We'll go with the flowable fill topped off to the braces before he pours. Thanks