Hello,
My husband and I are resurfacing our 15-year-old pool that came along with the house we bought last summer. It must have been built before the surge of simulated stone because it has beautiful, albeit dated, flagstone coping as well as a flagstone wall along one side, retaining walls and trim in other parts of the space in the same material.

We have been presented with basically one option for resurfacing and that is the Pebble Tec products. At this point, I think we are going to go with the color “ocean blue“ in the Pebble Sheen line although if anyone else with little kids wants to talk me out of that – I could probably be convinced. I do have some concerns about having a dark pool with three children under six. But now I digress.

The real reason for my post is that the pool company/contractor guy tells me that all of the coping has to be replaced and is pushing me towards stamped concrete. I’m opposed that for two reasons:
1. I am a sucker for natural materials and
2. I don’t care how “stone like” it looks. It’s not going to look like existing flagstone.

Admittedly, the flagstone is a bit dated at this point. However, I do think that natural materials really never go out of style and I’m certainly not prepared to replace all of the flagstone in the space with a different natural stone that I like better. So I think the solution is to absolutely insist on either new flagstone coping or using the existing flagstone which he told me would be “just as expensive“ because they will have to clean the existing stone before reinstalling it. But I don’t really care about that, do I? It doesn’t sound like it’s going to be more expensive than using the stamped concrete but even if it were more expensive— I just don’t see how I can mix stamped concrete with a lot of really high-quality flagstone.

I appreciate anyone else’s feedback on convincing their pool contractors to use natural materials. I did not think that I would have the struggle with the most expensive pool contractor in town but I am.

The pool is currently closed for the winter and covered so I cannot attach a recent picture and the only picture I have from last summer (when we moved in) is this one which is a bit hilarious but does give the viewer an idea of what the existing material looks like. In case anyone is wondering – yes, that is me and I am fully clothed and soaking wet after rescuing a twin distress. And no, the other twin is not actually urinating in the yard – it just looks like he is.

Thank you in advance for your thoughts and feedback.