Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Pool Fixes

From years of people walking on the edge of our pool for various reasons like cleaning it had caused a bunch of the bricks to come loose. Since Nate somehow convinced our friends five year old that it was fun to scoop leaves out of our pool we figured it would probably be a good idea to fix the loose bricks before she fell in. 

First Nate pulled out the sections that were loose.


For this first section, he spent awhile popping off the old mortar. In later sections, we kept as much of the sections intact as possible.



This left him with a bunch of bricks and an empty section.


He then cleaned the empty section to get a clean work surface.


He then used hydraulic water stop cement to secure the bricks. He worked in really small batches since the cement dried quickly. By not knocking off the mortar for later sections we were able to work much quicker and not waste as much of the cement securing the bricks.


 This is what the bricks looked like once they were all secured. Just to make sure, Nate spent awhile yanking on all the bricks and had me yank on them too just to check.


Once the bricks were secure, it was my turn. I used a white sanded grout to fill in all of the gaps between the bricks. The normal way of grouting doesn't work as well with this setup because the bricks are rough so I ended up using my hands to get a bunch of grout in the cracks and then I used a float to push the grout in all the way and get as much off the brick part as possible.


After letting it dry for a bit, we scrubbed the brick and viola! we had fixed and secured brick.


This was one of three sections of brick that we had to secure. We have two sections completely done and one section still needs to get grouted once all this tropical storm stuff is over!




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