A salt-finish pool deck in Oakville
The deck surrounds an in-ground pool behind a home in Glen Abbey, replacing an older broom-finish deck that had settled unevenly around the pool coping over about twenty years. The new deck covers roughly 680 sq ft in an L-shape around two sides and the shallow end of the pool.
We poured a salt-finish concrete slab, which uses coarse rock salt broadcast into the surface before it fully sets and then washed out once cured, leaving a lightly pitted texture that stays cooler underfoot in direct sun and grips better than a smooth trowel finish when wet. The slab is reinforced with wire mesh, isolated from the pool coping with an expansion joint so the two structures can move independently, and pitched away from the pool on all sides so runoff never collects against the shell.
Partway through demolition of the old deck we found the property's irrigation main running directly under the section closest to the house, about eight inches shallower than the irrigation plan on file suggested. Pouring over it as-is would have meant a slab crack the first time that line needed servicing. We had the irrigation contractor reroute that section of pipe around the new deck's footprint before we placed the base material, which held up the pour by two days while we waited for the reroute to be inspected and backfilled properly.
With that two-day delay, the project ran seven days from demolition to final seal, at the long end of our usual 4 to 7 day window for a pool deck this size. Final cost was $16,400, toward the upper half of our $14 to $28 per sq ft range because of the salt finish and the additional excavation depth needed to properly bury and re-tie the expansion joint into the existing pool coping. No permit was required for the deck resurfacing itself, since the pool structure and fencing were not altered.
The homeowners kept the pool closed for the week regardless, since foot traffic near fresh concrete this close to the water was not worth the risk before the finish had properly cured. We sealed the slab on day six and had them back in the water for the long weekend.
We also laid the control joints on a fresh four-foot grid across the whole deck instead of following the old joint lines, since the original layout was part of why the previous deck had cracked and settled unevenly in the first place. The new grid lines up with the pool coping's own expansion joint, so the finished deck reads as one consistent surface rather than a patchwork of differently aged pours.